The Milli Vanilli Condition

“Few times in history has the art of pretending enjoyed so much continuity and led to so few consequences as during the hinge-like period between the 20th century and the beginning of the next,” Eduardo Espina asserts in this collection of 13 essays. He laments the serial falsification of events, as when the German pop duo Milli Vanilli won a Grammy for songs that they in fact did not sing. Even they were seduced by their own deceit, initially denying the accusations. Ultimately, though, the group was stripped of its award.
Uruguayan-born poet Espina ponders the paradoxes of modern-day life in these essays on a wide variety of subjects, including the proliferation of flags in his small Texas town after 9/11, serial killers, nostalgia and even the Olympics. In “The Xerox Syndrome,” Espina examines the history of plagiarism, from a statement by King Solomon in Ecclesiastes 1:9 to contemporary times. Do people plagiarize, he wonders, because they love a text so much that they can’t leave it once they’ve finished reading it?
These pieces are always thoughtful and frequently humorous. In “Lives in the Supermarket,” he writes tongue-in-cheek that some supermarkets are better than museums. He would rather visit a Kroger than the MOMA, where at least there’s a bigger collection and no admission fee! Espina remembers the very first supermarket in Montevideo, Uruguay, where his grandfather worked, and another one in Paris, where he spent five hours as “a tourist among cereals and sausages.”
Translated from Spanish by Travis Sorenson, this serious but entertaining collection is a must-read for anyone interested in recent history, pop culture, language and everything in between.