What Odd Circumstance Joins Austin’s L.B. Deyo With Gabriel García Márquez Even Beyond the Ransom Center’s Newly Revealed Archives?

We don’t know if it’ll be on par with discovering ice, citizen, but UT’s Harry Ransom Center has the archives of Gabriel García Márquez on public display for the first time now.

[Note: The exhibition is available for your perusing pleasure until July 19.]

But maybe you don’t know a whole lot about the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author or his writings? Maybe you’ve only read his most well-known work, that powerhouse of magical realism and personal history called One Hundred Years of Solitude? And even that was a rather long while ago?

So, here’s a fleeting re-introduction for you, then – in eye-catching, digital motion – as rendered by Austin’s own L.B. Deyo.

And why did Deyo create such an homage? And how does he regard the renowned author in general?

“Marquez was one of the major figures of world literature in the second half of the twentieth century,” says the ginger-coiffed datamancer. “He strikes me as having demonstrated an almost Shakespearean capacity for internal contradiction.”

Wait, Gabriel García Márquez was … contradictory?

“Absolutely,” says Deyo. “He was the master, and to some extent a founder, of magical realism and its frequently sinister fairy-tale expressionism, yet his foundation was in journalism and the sober documentation of the real world. He was a radical leftist who revered Castro and Allende, yet he could disinterestedly satirize the entire spectrum of political belief. He shared the modernist reverence for science, but his style depended on his affecting perfect innocence of the limitations of natural law. One Hundred Years of Solitude in particular showcases the writer’s astonishing capaciousness and strength. Its scope and complexity are almost biblical, its sophistication and cunning balanced by a mythic simplicity. And, crucially, the book is hysterically funny. Heartbreaking, dark, expansive – but always a riot every time.”

Coincidentally – because these things are never planned and all conspiracies are without any base in reality, right? – that same L.B. Deyo will be, as ever, co-hosting the quarterly Dionysium show at the Alamo Drafthouse Village on this Wednesday night, Feb. 5. This latest iteration of the Dionysium is focused on Science and will present itself under the direction of Deyo and co-host Buzz Moran – and of course Graham Reynolds will be there to work the Wurlitzer magic, and Lance “Fever” Myers will present a science-y animated short, and it’s likely that much wine will be quaffed.

Coincidentally – because these things are never planned, etc. – that same Lance Myers co-hosts an ongoing literary podcast, Persistence of Vision, with the estimable Deyo. The podcast series showcases a diversity of locals talking about some of their favorite works of fiction (and sometimes their own literary projects), and, well, if the series continues long enough, we reckon someone will eventually get around to waxing rhapsodic about that Gabriel García Márquez.

And then we’ll have come full circle.

And who doesn’t like circles? Probably anti-vaxxers, right?

But of course everyone is always welcome at the Harry Ransom Center.