Review: Cervantes Street. Banned Books Update. On-Line Floricanto.

Review: Jaime Manrique, Cervantes Street

Jaime Manrique. Cervantes Street. NY: Akashic Books, 2012.
ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-107-3, ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-126-4 e-ISBN: 978-1-61775-140-0

Michael Sedano


Readers of the engrossing Captain Alatriste novels might think they know what to expect from Jaime Manrique’s absorbing novel, Cervantes Street. Like Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s series, Cervantes Street is set during Spain’s Epoca de Oro.

Hold on to your hats because Manrique has crafted a brilliant pastiche of a Spanish picaresque romance infected by a tip of the inkhorn’s quill to northern Europe’s euphuistic tradition and a historian's purview. Cervantes Street has a subtle academic subtext, a professor's illustrated lecture in rhetorical history and progenitors of the modern novel.

That aside, Cervantes Street comes just in time to break up a bleak outlook beset by political lying. Jaime Manrique’s diverting, fun, swift odyssey into Cervantes’ travels that inform his famous work, puts tall tales where they belong, in capable fiction.

Miguel Cervantes and powerful nemesis Luis de Lara, are twins of a sort. Cervantes is the scholarship kid schooled among caballeros. Luis is one of the young gentlemen. Drawn together by literary affinity—they burn to write—they devote hours to wine and reciting and plotting novels.

Cervantes is the epicurean; voluble, productive, a liberal. Luis is the stoic; considered, spare, a conservative. The liberal is essentially an autodidact, while the conservative reaffirms the classical model of educating a kid through Greek and Latin studies, the trivium--grammar rhetoric and logic--and the quadrivium--arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy. Those are SAT questions.

Author Manrique’s recreation of Spanish literary style from 1569 to 1616 comes peppered with fantastic magical developments like cheating husbands turned into donkeys, opera buffo situations like a cuckold hiding behind a tapestry in a farcial comeuppance, grotesque ethnographies of gypsies, Moslem slavers, heretics burned at the stake by holy inquisitors.

Some of the fun Manrique lifts from Cervantes’ work. In the author’s Note to the Reader, he acknowledges eight elements Manrique hopes seamlessly fit into his own invention. Readers will detect a certain brilliance when they come across those paragraphs. If not, Manrique makes sure to remind readers where this stuff comes from and where it’s heading:

I could hardly believe that part of my past had really happened, because it seemed like a fantastical chapter in a chivalric novel written by a capricious historian with no regard for the truth. (201)

Cervantes, in turn, borrows from Arab storytellers—he owes his life to Arab invention and style. Enslaved in Algiers, he begs pittances for his recitations and strikes out. Another slave critiques him, telling the failing rhapsode, “that’s what I want from a story. The Arab storytellers know that.” When Cervantes adapts the style to his genius, he and fellow slave Sancho Panza enjoy a taste of psychic liberty.

The wild hippie Cervantes falls headlong through the misfortune cyclone that produces his Don Quixote Part I and Don Quixote II. The conservative Luis Lara, cuckolded by his false friend Cervantes, and ever the spare stoic, holds a lifelong grudge that culminates in a fraudulent Don Quixote Part II, under a nom de plume. Cervantes, and Epicureanism, win in the end, but not without acknowledging the utility of an occasional nod to the stoics. When Cervantes’ enslavement cages him at the bottom of a cramped hole, he finds solace thinking of the stoic Seneca.

Readers unprepared for belly laughs are advised not to enjoy a tasty beverage while reading this exploration of bulb-bursting Spring by the dedicated stoic Lara:

Beginning in late March, when the first daffodils broke the ground and the weeping willows turned from gold to light green, large crowd took up residence on the public benches. The women sat on the sunny spots of the plaza and picked lice from each other’s hair.

Readers unprepared for a good time will find double reward therefore if they’re lucky enough to stumble upon Jaime Manrique’s Cervantes Street. Readers who seek out Akashic Books' reliably entertaining releases will marvel that the publisher and author have a winner. If your indie bookseller stocks it—or will sell you the e-book password--Cervantes Street should be in your hands.



Banned Books Update

September 21, 2012, eleven days in the future, comes the Special Master's Report in the Federal oversight of Tucson schools.

Back in 2009, the court ended supervision of the district, acknowledging the district's assurances it would "operate for the advocacy and equal advantage of every child." TUSD lied. The court found the district acted in bad faith.

The September 21 release of the report contains the Special Master's proposal to run the district in a manner consistent with that "advocacy and equal advantage" commitment. Thereafter, the Court takes the report as a recommendation and the judge issues a decision.

Status Quo: The books are still banned. Old Glory has no reason to proudly wave.


"First Time in the Physical Universe"

That phrase jumps off the page in the most provocative claim ever asserted in a library exhibition:

The USC community has worked since February to bring this three-dimensional, mathematical art object into being for the first time in the history of the physical universe.

Fractal visualizations abound on the internet. They're what we used to call in the 1960s "psychedelic, mind-blowing, far out, trippy, groovy." This appears to be all that, and more. USC has created a three-dimension version of the mathematical expression, fashioning it from standard business cards.

The object and the exhibition come to public view on September 20. For more information, visit the object's site here.

La Bloga On-Line Floricanto • 2d Tuesday
Jan Michael Alejandro, Victor Avila, Andrea Hernandez Holm, Ramon Piñero, Maritza Rivera


Anchor Baby by Jan Michael Alejandro
Dream Zone by Victor Avila
Homelands by Andrea Hernandez Holm
When I Write by Ramon Piñero
Arpaio by Maritza Rivera



Anchor Baby
Jan Michael Alejandro

I was there when they handcuffed her
The frightened look on her face
haunts me most every night
I was only nine
when they peeled me off of her leg
and took her away
I started to run towards her
but I was stopped by a stranger
As they loaded her into the car
I had to close my eyes
She was crying so hard
I couldn’t watch
I was too scared
Nine years ago
and the last time I saw my mother
My foster parents said
your mother was an illegal alien
and you are an Anchor Baby
I didn’t know what any of that meant
but I know now
She wanted a better life for herself
She wanted a better life for me
But I think
I would have had a better life
living with her
I understand why many feel the need to flee their country
I don’t understand why they come to a place where they are not wanted.
Maybe they believed in this quote:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse
of your teeming shore.
Send these,
the homeless,
tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp
beside the golden door."



Dream Zone
by Victor Avila

I walk through a forest,
I'm swallowed by trees.
Leaves fall upon me
inducing sleep.

A night full of animals
stare from the woods.
Darkness surrounds us,
imagination steps forth.

Through valleys at midnight
a clear river flows.
Fields washed in moonlight,
asleep in the dream zone.

We discover coins
and hear tambourines.
We smell eucalyptus,
we've forgotten our names.

A lock of your hair,
a poem Lorca wrote-
we'll read in the fishlight
asleep in the dream zone.

When I Write
by Ramon Piñero

every time
I sit to
write a poem
about the
movement
of clouds
the feel of
rain on
my face
the touching
pictures
of kittens
playing with
a ball of
yarn.
some kid
somewhere
is shot
or even
worse
made to
kill someone
else,
a friend
a cousin
or perhaps,
who knows?
every time
I sit to
write a poem
about the
beauty
of the
countryside
the majesty
of mountain
tops scraping
the floors
of heaven
some guy
beats
his
wife
or even
worse;
some child
somewhere
has forgotten
what food
tastes like
what a warm
meal feels like
when a loving
kiss goodnight
promises a
bright tomorrow
it seems that
when I begin
to write about
the joys of
fatherhood,
some kid is
wondering
which father
is coming
through the
front door;
daddy or
Mr. Hyde
sometimes when
I'm ready to write
about
metamorphosis
and transformation
someone's daughter
is found to have
transformed
from descendent to
ancestor
at the
hands of
someone
who has morphed
from human
to monster.
when I hear
the sounds
of hooves
behind me
I want them
to be
unicorns
or zebras;
instead
I fear
they are
the Four
Horsemen
come to
collect
a debt
incurred
by all


Arpaio
by Maritza Rivera

Abuse of power
lurking around the corners
of our barrios.


BIOS

Jan Michael Alejandro is a published and produced poet, playwright and composer. His poems, musicals and plays have been performed in Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and Bay Area. Jan founded the Los Angeles Limerick Fest, and his limericks have been broadcast on American Public Media’s Marketplace.

Jan’s dada, avant-garde, beatnik inspired CD was released and premiered at the Dada Poetry Salon IV in Greenwich Village, on March 18, 2011, and his spoken word book, “What’s Mine Is Now Yours,” was also released last year.

Jan’s produced plays & musicals include What’s the Play About?, Myjovi el Musical, Bad Dad, Letecia, Foreplay, No Rest For Santa, Mountain Road, Baking With Mrs. Claus, Ornament Exchange, Chin Up, Personal Space Invaders, and Common Bonds, which received “Critics Pick” from Backstage West.

Check out some of Jan’s work on www.youtube.com/user/jansplays and
www.jansplays.com

Victor Avila is an award-winning poet. Two of his poems were recently included in the anthology Occupy SF-Poems From the Movement. He is also an illustrator. Three of his ghost stories were published in the latest issue Ghoula Comix #2. Victor has taught in California public schools for over twenty years.

Ex Bay Area poet living in the buckle of the Bible Belt , aka Florida. Where good little boys and girls grow up to be republicans who vote against their own interest. Father of three and Grandfather to six of the coolest kids ever

Maritza Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet who has been writing poetry for over 40 years. Her work has been published in literary magazines, anthologies and online publications. She is the author of About You, a collection of poetry “for women and the men they love” and her most recent book of poetry, A Mother’s War, was written during her son’s two tours in Iraq to help make war a reality for everyone. Maritza is a regular contributor to Poets Responding to SB1070, she hosts the annual Mariposa Poetry Retreat at the Capital Retreat Center inWaynesboro, PA and was the recipient of a 2012 BID International Writing Fellowship in Bahia, Brazil. She is also active with the Memorial Day Writers Project and collaborates with the Warrior Poetry Project at the new Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, MD.