Lunching with Carrizo

It took me about thirty seconds to realize why Antonio Carrizo had become a star. At 82, Carrizo is still dressed to the nines with charisma, from his omnipresent beret to the rye smiles and winks that he uses to color his thoughts on everything from the mastery of Joyce to the
genius of Argentine striker Carlos Tevez.

Antonio Carrizo is one of Argentina's most famous radio and television personalities, an interviewer-gentleman who probably finds his closest American analog in Charlie Rose. I shared lunch with Carrizo and several other members of my Borges class earlier today (as well as last Saturday) to discuss a project in which he has asked us to participate.
Over his career, Carrizo interviewed Borges twenty five times, and compiled the interviews into a book a few years back. Now, he wants to release a new edition that uses transcripts of the edited radio segments instead of the raw unedited conversation. Carrizo has asked the 12 or so members of the class to do the transcription work.

Transcription is a real pain of which I've had plenty of experience over the last two months while preparing my articles for All About Jazz. (Speaking of which, since my last post, AAJ has published two more. You can find them here and here.) Sharing lunch with Carrizo, however, was a pleasure.

In the great tradition of autodidacts, Carrizo never finished high school, but has a razor sharp mind and command of seemingly every subject. During an impromptu lecture on Joyce, which was a sidebar from a discussion on the campo crisis, Carrizo managed to simultaneously watch a match between Racing and Independiente, heckling one of the waiters at a missed goal opportunity. He's not the kind of celebrity that prompts people in the cafe to stop what they are doing and gawk, but as he walked out and chided a group of Racing fans, I heard a few emphatic whispers, "that's Carrizo!"