1962 The first Scribe notebooks are manufactured in Mexico.
1966 Five hundred fifty years ago, Poggio Bracciolini discovered an edition of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria in an old tower at the Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland.
1967 U.S. country singer Leroy Van Dyke stars in the film What Am I Bid?
1968 Possibly the 50th anniversary of the invention of the Chinese fortune cookie by Donald Lau in Los Angeles.
October 12, 1968 The Olympic Games open in Mexico.
1968 Multimedia artist Doug Aitken is born in Redondo Beach, California.
1966
Highway is employed as a security guard at the Jumex factory in Ecatepec de Morelos.
He continues collecting.
1967 The Beatles release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with an album sleeve designed by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth.
1967 Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” is published in Artforum.
1967 The 150th anniversary of the publication of The Round Table, a collection of essays by William Hazlitt.
October 2, 1968 Protesting students are massacred in Tlatelolco Square, Mexico City.
1970 Mexican American author and editor David Miklos is born in San Antonio, Texas.
1971 Four hundred years since Michel de Montaigne, weary of active life, retired to his father’s château at age thirty-seven.
1971 Essayist, poet, and editor Luigi Amara is born in Mexico City.
1971 Miguel Calderón, the enfant terrible of Mexican art, is born in Mexico City.
1973 Jorge Luis Borges resigns as director of the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires after being awarded the first Premio Internacional Alfonso Reyes.
1973 Centennial of the publication of John Stuart Mill’s autobiography, which includes comments on how Quintilian influenced his thinking.
July 2, 1976 Saigon renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
1976 The Voltaire Foundation is inaugurated at the University of Oxford.
1978 Carlos Velázquez, writer of norteña literature, is born in Coahuila, Mexico.
Early 1970s Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas first reads about the artist Raymond Roussel in the works of Marcel Duchamp.
1970 Bicentennial of the first scholarly translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives from the original Greek into English.
October 1, 1970 Janis Joplin records “Mercedes Benz” at the Sunset Sound recording studio in Los Angeles.
1971 Approximately 1,600 years since a young Augustine of Hippo prayed, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
1971 Three-dimensional artist Fernando Ortega is born in Mexico City.
1971 Part I of Allan Kaprow’s “The Education of the Un-Artist” is published in Art News 69. In 2011, Mexican author and poet Daniel Saldaña París uploads Kaprow’s essay to Scribd.
1974 Poet, essayist, and editor Luis Felipe Fabre is born in Mexico City: Pisces, Libra ascendant, moon in Aries.
1975–1982 Fifty years since the serial-format publication of Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin.
1976 The 350th anniversary of the death of Francis Bacon, the father of empiricism, who suffered pneumonia after conducting an experiment on the effects of freezing meat, which involved stuffing a fowl with snow.
April 15, 1980 Tens of thousands join Jean-Paul Sartre’s funeral precession to his burial plot in Montparnasse.
1982 Bicentennial of the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire.
1982 In the introduction to a collection of stories by Robert Walser, Susan Sontag compares Walser’s prose to the art of Paul Klee.
Circa 1980
Highway is promoted to Crisis Manager.
He begins collecting courses.
1980 Pablo Duarte, editor of the Letras Libres website, is born in Mexico City.
1981 An asteroid is discovered and named 3453 Dostoevsky.
1982 In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke introduces Kripkenstein, a fictional character who holds views based on Wittgenstein’s writings.
1983 Mexican short-story writer, novelist, and playwright Jorge Ibargüengoitia is buried in Antillón Park beneath a plaque that reads: “Here lies Jorge Ibargüengoitia, in the park of his great-grandfather who fought against the French.”
June 25, 1984 Michel Foucault dies at age fifty-seven in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.
1984
Highway marries Flaca.
1983 Five hundredth anniversary of the publication of Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, Caxton edition, which recounts the lives of the saints.
1984 Mexican singer José María Napoleón, often called the poet of melody, releases the single “Nunca cambies.”
September 19, 1985 Massive earthquake under Mexico City leaves at least ten thousand people dead.
1986 Jean Baudrillard writes America, an account of his travels in the United States.
September 19, 1985
Siddhartha Sánchez Tostado is born.
September 1985 “Highwayman” is number one on the U.S. country music charts.
1985 Carlos Fuentes publishes Gringo viejo.
June 8, 1987 Singer-songwriter Juan Cirerol — Mexico’s Johnny Cash — is born in Mexicali. His second album includes the track “Clonazepam Blues.”
1987 Mexican writer Mario Bellatin travels to Cuba to study screenwriting.
1986–1987
Highway attends an auctioneering course given by Master Oklahoma.
He meets Leroy Van Dyke at the Missouri Auction School.
Flaca leaves Highway, taking Siddhartha with her.
1987 Mexican author Guillermo Fadanelli lives in Berlin for a year and is surprised to find that the beer is not served cold.
July 1988 Centennial of the first-edition publication of Rubén Darío’s Azul.
1989 Josefina Vicens’s short story “Petrita” is published posthumously. The story is based on a painting entitled La niña muerta, which was given to Vicens by the artist Juan Soriano.
1988–2000
Highway becomes a successful auctioneer and travels widely. He begins to develop his allegoric auctioning method.
1989 A Yoko Ono retrospective is held at a Whitney Museum branch.
1991 The 650th anniversary of the appointment of Petrarch as the first poet laureate since the classical era.