Colorful writing

I admit, I speak Spanish with an atrocious accent, but have a colorful vocabulary which I cheerfully attribute to perverse reading habits.

I love notas rojas — “red notes”, the police reports in the local newspapers.  While full of the purple prose typical of the yellow journalism, they are an art form.  Not just because the correspondent is usually paid by the word are notas rojas sometimes literature worthy of Cervantes, giving an epic grandeur to the mundane world of human frailty and stupidity, but because the best of the writers understands the joy in reading is the element of surprise.

While sometimes the author — to stretch out the word count — has to resort to low tricks like referring to a police car as a “blue and white 2008 Dodge Neon, with plate number… “, the nota rota writer strives for variation in his or her craft.   The banality of criminal activity sometimes reduces even the most creative of nota roja writers to clichés (there are a plethora of ways to say “corpse” — the center of attention but least interesting character in any murder story —  all of which have been use to death), but the best are true artists.  They still manage to surprise us, enlighten us and delight us with their mastery of the language.

How much really, can one say about a drug bust.  The anonymous writer of a three-paragrapher in yesterday’s  El Debate de Sinaloa, didn’t have a real promising plot to work with — the headline (Militares atrapan a 3 tipos, les aseguran armas y droga en Guasave — “Soldiers nab thee guys in Guasave  said to have arms and drugs”) about wraps the story up. Soldiers, acting on a tip, raided a house and caught two guys in one house and a third guy who made a run for it.   End of story. But, out of such unpromising material as “militares” the author crafts a  wonderfully poetic image.

“Elementos del Ejército” (elements of the army), a dull and bureaucratic cliché in the first paragraph gives way to “Los castrenses” (those who live in barracks), a good metaphor, in that it suggests the ordinariness of soldiers ; and then, unexpectedly,  as the soldiers close in on the one who almost got away as “un grupo de verdeolivo” (a group of olive-green) — the soldiers as a mass of color — like a flock of birds… or birds of prey?  … an image that would appeal to poets in any number of languages, something Arthur Rimbaud might have written, or Amy Lowell or the young (not yet totally bonkers) Ezra Pound, or Salvador Novo.