A Library, a dismemberment. About Library for spine-readers, by Lester Alvarez and Kevin Avila. 

It was precisely a French writer who said that writing was writing what we would write if we wrote. A witty phrase, like an eighteenth-century salon full of Volterian madams, brilliant, aggressive, always superior to certain gouty gentlemen called with infatuated authority "philosophers". Writing, that paralyzing anguish, that problem as of editorial metaphysics, that strange prestige as of midwives of fiction and nonfiction, would be, in the end, a question of daring, of construction and verification. To write is to dare to write. But apparently, the thing is not so easily simplified. The sentence is not merely ingenious, it is perverse. Its use of the conditional "if" is hurtful, almost devastating; it has the violence of an inculpation: it seems to accuse writers of vulgar inoperativeness, of absenteeism. It seems that, in the end, the usual thing is that writers do not write, that they are anguished for not writing, that they commit the millenary mistake of defining themselves as writers without daring too much. That is why we must return to the act that gives evidential value to the definition of the writer: the writer must write in order to be a writer, and what is writing? It is to write what we would write... if we write (as living is to live what we would live... if we would live).

And what would we write if we wrote? Biblioteca para lomo-lectores or Library for spine-readers is an answer to that question. But an answer in jest. More than a map of what some of our friends would have wanted to write, if we had taken the trouble to write it, the work is a map of anecdotes, jokes, parodies, witticisms, intuitions, that were reaching the existence of challenging titles. Shock statements, terrorism of venting against Power and its infinite mediocrities. Jokes about what a certain philosopher (Marxist, but curiously broad and very lucid) called in one of his titles the damaged life. Laughter inside the cage of the Local, under the shadow of a village totalitarianism or vulgar dictatorship. Cuba...

For a long time, our conversations were a mere record of titles. There was enthusiasm. Excess of stimulating connections. We may not always have displayed the samurai rigor that destroys the imperfect. But we didn't save everything either. In general, the most important thing was to dismember Cuba and for each title to be the meat of that dismemberment.   

Many of these titles are parodies of other titles. Parody: perverse appropriation, subversion, destruction of the power of the referent, of its prestige; alchemy: through parody we turned the shit of infamous local titles into gold, laughter (detour). Or we made just the opposite inversion: we made the gold of a remote and innocent title become local shit and laughter (thus we staged how the Local dirties everything or seems to want to reduce everything to its dimensions). Around those parody titles, the others appeared, the ones that demanded a certain effort of composition.