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Without Camels: A Caravan of Latino Writing

Quercus Review is putting together a special section of Latina and Latino imaginative writing—“Without Camels: A Caravan of Latino Writing”—for its 10th anniversary edition. The writer Fred Arroyo will help edit this section.

From the editor: Jorge Luis Borges once suggested a caravan of imaginative writing that existed outside or without labels like “Latino.” Borges considered that what is authentic in literature cannot be limited by cultural, ethnic, or nationalistic markers. Borges tells us, “the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab Nationalist would do [in writing and trying to emphasize an “authentic” reality] is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page” (“The Argentine Writer and Tradition”). Latino writing springs from a rich tradition, and in its continuity and change there is a company of writers who are traveling together. This caravan is populated by diverse visions, aesthetics, experiences, and feelings that move outside and beyond labels. We want to capture this movement, this energia. And we want to see and hear and feel it in imaginative writings “without camels.” Caravan is also evoked to echo the song of the same name, which was written by the outstanding trombonist Juan Tizol (Puerto Rico, 1900-1984). Not actually a first, however, since the composition borrows or responds to Middle Eastern traditions. Those rhythms—that borrowing, mixing, and response—are also the caravan of imaginative writings by Latinos we want to share with a larger audience.

Poetry: Send 2-3 previously unpublished poems with cover letter and SASE. We do not accept simultaneous or electronic submissions of poetry. Please include a brief bio in your cover letter. We prefer poems that do not exceed 40 lines, though we will consider longer work.

Fiction: Send previously unpublished stories with cover letter and SASE. Simultaneous submissions okay with notification upon acceptance elsewhere. Please include a brief bio in your cover letter. We consider fiction up to 7000 words. All work must be double-spaced, paginated, with your name included on each page.

Please send submissions to

Fred Arroyo
Department of English
2505 University Avenue
Drake University
Des Moines, IA 50311

Or

Quercus Review
ATTN: Sam Pierstorff, Editor
Modesto Junior College
Department of English
435 College Ave.
Modesto, CA 95350

Please note: We will not read manuscripts that do not include an SASE (self-addressed, stamped envelope). Please submit separately for each genre. Also, please include an email address and/or phone number in your cover letter. DEADLINE: November 15, 2009.

◙ UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center books receive awards: Three CSRC Press titles received awards at the 2009 International Latino Book Awards. The Art of Healing Latinos: Firsthand Accounts from Physicians and Other Health Advocates, edited by David Hayes-Bautista, UCLA professor and CSRC affiliate, and Roberto Chiprut, was awarded first place in the Nonfiction–Health Book in English category. Receiving second place in the Nonfiction–Biography in English category was Paths to Discovery: Autobiographies from Chicanas with Careers in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering, edited by Norma E. Cantú. Karen Mary Davalos’s Yolanda M. López, volume 2 in the A Ver: Revisioning Art History series, was awarded honorable mention in the Nonfiction–Arts Book in English category. The awards were presented during BookExpo America on May 28. More information about these award-winning books is available on the CSRC Press webpage.

◙ WRITERS WHO BLOG: Al Martinez, ever the wordsmith and cautious optimist, offers a new installment on his blog as he contemplates his 60th wedding anniversay. And author Sergio Troncoso also is blogging away over at ChicoLingo. Last but not least, Joe Loya launched his blog on the 13th anniversary of his release from prison.

◙ NEW YA TITLE REVIEWED: Rigoberto González, an award-winning writer living in New York City, reviews Alex Sanchez’s new young adult novel, Bait (Simon & Schuster, $16.99 hardcover), which González calls “a heart-wrenching tale about a young man coping with the trauma of sexual molestation.”

◙ THE LATEST FROM LatinoLA.com:

TOP Ten Signs Your Cat May Be Latina by Al Carlos Hernandez, Contributing Editor

News from the Brown Side of Town, 9.3.09 by Frankie Firme, Conributing Editor

RIP: Tierra's Isaac Avila by Manny Saucedo

Deported Veterans by Hector G. Lopez

Saving High School's Music Program Through Music

10,000 Latinos Learning to Read by 2010

A Brief History of East LA Revue.com Internet Radio, Part 1 by Steven Chavez

◙ LITERARY NEWS: Jennine Capó Crucet was born to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, the Southern Review, the Northwest Review, and other magazines. She is the recipient of a Bread Loaf Scholarship and has been a finalist for the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize and the University of California, Irvine, Chicano/Latino Literary Prize. A graduate of Cornell University, she currently lives and writes in Los Angeles.

Crucet’s debut collection, How to Leave Hialeah, has just been released by the University of Iowa Press. Publishers Weekly says:

In this engrossing collection—sometimes intense, at other times darkly humorous—debut author Crucet portrays the daily challenges, heartbreak and family ties that penetrate Hialeah, a working-class Cuban-American neighborhood in Miami. In “El Destino Hauling,” a young girl pays witness to a night-long family funeral for a father who was run over by his son, perhaps by intent. “The Next Move” follows a grandfather left to struggle through the day without his wife while she's visiting family in Cuba. In “Men Who Punched Me in the Face,” a woman repeatedly drawn to abusive men convinces herself she enjoys being hit. A story set in the Cuban countryside finds a young woman struggling to make ends meet with just three prized possessions: a rooster, a bar of soap and Kotex maxi pads. Crucet details vividly the daily struggle that leads Cubans to prize their heritage above much else, but also illuminates a powerful need to escape the past.

◙ That’s all for now. So, in the meantime, enjoy the intervening posts from mis compadres y comadres here on La Bloga. And remember: ¡Lea un libro!

Mayra Santos-Febres and Our Lady of the Night

Our Lady of the Night by Mayra Santos-Febres
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Pub. Date: August 2009
ISBN-13: 9780061731303 368pp

Liz Vega

As I become wiser in the ways of the world, I find myself being

drawn more and more to irreverent poets, those that do not put brakes to the velocity and intensity of feelings that their words create. A fierce poet I admire and whose words I love to hear aloud is Mayra Santos-Febres. Let me here introduce La Bloga readers who are not familiar with this woman to one of the most vibrant voices among contemporary Caribbean, Latin American writers.

I met Santos-Febres when she was a visiting professor at Cornell and I bought her poetry book, Anamú y Manigua. Mayra, as you can see from the picture, is stunning, or as they say in Spanish, una mujer despampanante. She is the image that Caribbean music conjures up and when she walks into a room you want to know who she is. I will confess that I first bought her poetry book simply because I was drawn to her but I fell in love with her writing from the first stanza,

Sale a darle clemencia al universo
a su lado

se coagula toda bruma

en paralela negritud:

mi abuela

reordena el caos nómada

de todas las mañanas

cuando todavía no bullen

sus deliberadas tetas opíparas

de querer atrapar el escándalo

y volverlo hojas secas para barrer

She goes out to give mercy to the universe

at her side

the mist is all around

in parallel negritude:

my grandmother
reorders the nomadic chaos

of every morning

when her puposeful ample breasts

still do not seethe from wanting to trap the scandal

and turn it like dried leaves for sweeping up

This particular verse is just a small snippet, the entire book is about women in the life of Santos-Febres. She is a writer that venerates and loves her African roots and talks about the inherent problems of Puerto Rican society that denies or doesn't give its proper place to that part of its history.

Those first words that captivated me were written in 1990. Since then Santos-Febres has gone on to become a Guggenheim fellow and recipient of a number of literary awards. She has penned many short stories and novels, her latest is Nuestra Señora de la Noche (2006). It has just been translated into English as, Our Lady of the Night, and is available through Harper Perennial. I read this book in Spanish and while I have never read her in translation I peeked at some of the English excerpts and I am sure it will not disappoint.

Our Lady of the Night, is the story of Isabel Luberza Oppenheimer, better known as Isabel, La Negra, an important figure in Puerto Rican folklore and mythology. In a raw, sensual, prose Mayra Santos-Febres tells us the story of Doña Isabel, a black woman who through her brothel became one of the most powerful, respected and feared women in her town. A feat made even more impressive by the fact that she came out of nothing, was abandoned as a little girl and had to work as a maid, seamstress, even a liquor bootlegger. Mayra Santos-Febres uses multiple voices to depict a 1940's Puerto Rican society that is fragmented by race, class and socio-economic status. She gives us an accurate reflection of the social composition of the times, the hypocritical morality of the upper classes and the struggle of the poor to overcome their circumstances. By the end of the book, the reader has a complete story, that encompasses the different point of views of different characters and different times.

In a sociological context, Our Lady of the Night is a case study of the collision that happens when the primal urges of the tropical Caribbean come in contact with the materialistic American way of life. In another context, to use a frame of reference with which I am all too familiar, it is a kick-ass novela love story with an atypical heroine, fiercer even than Rubí, a telenovela protagonist who also gives up and denies herself the love of a man for the ambition of power.

One of the voices in the narration of Our Lady of the Night, sounded at times, like a prayer or like a Plena, the genre of music that like the Mexican corrido tell the stories of occurences that touch the imaginations of the people in a political, religious, social tone. Incidentally, Plena also has its originis in the same part of Ponce where Isabel La Negra lived. I was fascinated by Isabel's story much like I was fascinated by Arturo Perez-Reverte's La Reina Del Sur, which also became a corrido by Los Tigres Del Norte. Both of these women are characters feared and admired who are able to move in male-dominated spheres, like prostitution and drug-trafficking.

Isabel Luberza's story is one that has captivated other writers like Rosario Ferré. In 1974, Ferré wrote a short story*about two women, Isabel Luberza and Isabel La Negra, one white and one black, one the wife and one the mistress. In this story like in Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire, two different women are part of the whole. Ferré's story is an exploration of the duality of woman and the juxtaposition of the whore and the lady, carnal love and divine love, and the bonding that occurs so that one eventually becomes the other.

Ultimately, what I realized in reading Our lady of the Night is that Isabel Luberza Oppenheimer's story is the story of Puerto Rico and its relationship as a colony, a commonwealth to the U.S. and I can't help but quote Mayra Santos-Febres in an interview on her blog:

"Además, tengo ganas de decirte una cosa terrible, decirte "en todas las historias de las naciones hay una puta fundadora". Pienso en Evita Perón, en las madres fundadoras de la nación norteamericana, la mayoría putas. Pienso en La Malinche , mujer vendida como cosa a Cortés. Me gusta pensar en la historia desde esa perspectiva, no desde la del "padre" legítimo de la patria,o desde la Madre sufrida que pare al pueblo legítimo y soberano; sino desde ese rincón oculto de la Puta escondida que puja a la nación bastarda."

I searched for an accurate translation of this quote and was unable to find one, so here's my best rendition:

Besides, I want to tell you a terrible thing, tell you " in all of the histories of nations there is a founding whore". I'm thinking about Evita Peron, about the founding mothers of the northamerican nation, the majority were whores. I'm thinking about la Malinche, woman that was sold like a thing to Cortes. I like to think of history from that perspective, not from that of the legitimate "father" of the country or from the suffering mother that births the legitimate and sovereign people; but from that occult corner of the hidden whore that pushes out a bastard nation.

To learn more about Mayra Santos-Febres

visit her website, http://www.mayrasantos-febres.com/

or link to her blog http://mayrasantosfebres.blogspot.com/

*Ferré, Rosario. "Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres." In Papeles de Pandora, 23-38. Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz, 1976. ISBN 9682701066

Atop the mt. - 4

[Last installment of what I call a quasi-vision quest. Read first installment here and the previous one here.]

The dog and I have three choices for where to bed down for the night. The first niche rests on a ledge surrounded by four-foot boulders, facing southwest; it offers the widest view, and I judge it exhilarating at sunrise. Problem is, it's so well enclosed, my dream-bears could unexpectedly come upon us in the dark, through no fault of their own. The second is on the plateau, but affords only bare rock for sleeping space, since large red ants have colonized everywhere else. So we take the third on the face of the mt., which provides some safety from oscine or insect. There's space enough for the dog and a smaller one for me to keep watch. I don't plan on sleeping; that's not what I'm here for. I take my last photo.

After securing Manchas's food high up a scrawny pine and my unopened crackers on a ledge where neither can be reached by Mr. Bear, and as the sun caresses the crest of the western mountains, I light my second cig and wait. For what?

Not unlike early Great Plains indigenes, to my rear I can see "Pike's" Peak, which is sometimes still visible all the way to the Kansas border. Unlike those first Americans, I wasn't drawn here by any belief or understanding of the Great Spirit embodied in that rocky mountain. I am very like campers and tourists who consider the area more suited for pitching tents and hill-climb racing. A crown on the eastern mountains faintly gleams of the urban lights of Colo. Springs. How far away have I really come?

But the dog and I are alone. We're so high up, no park noise reaches us, no porch lights, though throughout the night, jet engines and airliner's flashing lights high up too often pass over. As daylight leaves us, most of the birds cease their activity and communing. One last drink of water for both of us, to toast the coming night.

After maybe an hour of starlight my mind ceases dwelling on daily concerns. I don't need to worry, plan or decide anything about the house, the job, the truck or the world I left behind, even though only for this night. So what then will I "think" about? The brain requires something to occupy itself and exist, no?

Some time later I realize how "by myself" I truly am, and not simply in the sense that no one sits beside me. More, I'm not in a room by myself, surrounded by my electronics, furniture, paper and constructed walls, enclad by my modern man-ness, there's little here of creations or possessions of artificial making. I have the small thin blanket, clothes and bare necessities. No tent or sleeping bag to enclose me; I won't even make a primitive man's fire to keep away my bears or relieve the night chill when it comes--the closest I'll get to deprivation. I consider going totally bare skin, but am too civilized and don't want to shock Manchas.

So what's the deal about being alone out here? First, it's disorienting. The organic and inorganic that normally root you to society's concrete foundations are absent, and I miss them. Light waves of vertigo flow through me, as if I'm repeatedly on the verge of falling from lack of references to hold onto. I keep righting myself, and my mind grasps for reliable and familiar objects, purposes and goals, but they're not there. Right before the sensation threatens to reach a high level of anxiety, it stops. It will flash back later, but in minor, tolerable versions.

Now something else threatens: my heartbeat is the loudest thing about, no owl hoots tonight, no cougar snarls here. Silence seems to promise only boredom. Will I not make it till dawn because I died of that? How unromantic. How . . . boring.

Manchas stirs, twirls and circles to find better footing. He lies down and attempts to hold onto the slope with his nails to keep from sliding. He does this a few times through the night, but will succeed in getting much more sleep than I.

I take a swallow of water. It tastes incredibly good, more refreshing than I can remember. We're down to a quart.

I peer into the darkness under the trees where the stars don't reach. I imagine primitive man doing the same, with his survival possibly at stake if he fails to notice something. I remove my glasses to see as he saw and wonder how my genetic line made it through those times. With such poor vision, my ancestor must have easily qualified as bear food. Yet, I'm here, so survival of the fittest must not be the whole story. Pure luck played some part.

After awhile of the darkness-peering I look to the heavens. I haven't googled what I saw and don't plan to. At the time I assume it is some optical imprint from staring into darkness. Everywhere between the stars fills with a mosaic, that reminds me of Palenque inscriptions carved in stone there, but these aren't Maya. Mine are abstract, without characteristic design, lacking rational meaning. Their complexity, intricateness beg capturing, drawing onto paper that I have but won't use. Their beauty stays in my mind to this day. At some point they fade into the black of outer space. I assume I can make them appear again by repeating the process. I probably didn't have my vision, but I feel slightly exhilarated, anyway.

I expected the wind would kick up during the night, but it stays light, hardly reaching us, down as we are below the crest. A couple of gnats and horseflies visit briefly, about all the wildlife that makes its presence known to us. This will not qualify for an episode of Wild Kingdom.

The near full moon is high up now. At least I can see Mr. Bear if he tries making it down the two narrow paths to us. But I doubt we'll be entertained by that; it's too damn steep. Manchas rises, this time not just to find a better spot. He stares fixedly, to the crest looming above us, listening for something. It's nothing large or he would bark. Probably a chipmunk or such. He'll do this a couple more times tonight, again never barking. Just staring. Maybe wondering. He finds a new spot.

I can't find my own. I should have done more removing of smaller rocks to make a comfortable bed for the two of us. I take naps, but the mt. doesn't allow me more than a few minutes of sleep. My shaking knees awake me from what will be the last nap; they shake from the cold. They won't stop. I don the sweatshirt. It doesn't stop the knees. Then it's all my legs. I wrap them with the blanket. That doesn't work either.

I do the math. It averages fifteen degrees cooler here than the maybe fifty-five in the Springs. That means it's something like forty, maybe colder. No wonder I shake. The Boy Scout motto pops into my head. Dummy me may be prepared for a vision, but not for the mt.'s cold. I could locate wood to build a fire, but that might take me out of what we climbed so high to find. Now to see if a little temperature deprivation will help bring that vision.

Manchas of course isn't shaking. Curling up with him doesn't help me enough to make it worth tolerating his dog smell. He's my companion, comrade in this, but there's an olfactory limit to all friendships. The sweatshirt and blanket feel like they've lost their thickness. My shivering becomes uncontrollable. It's too dark, unsafe to go down to where it's undoubtedly warmer. After what feels like forever, I give up trying to control the uncontrollable and let the cold in.

My body is hallucinating. Not visually, not through any of the five senses. Some other way. Maybe it's an early frostbite symptom. Don't matter. I just shiver. My body feels different. Disconnected. Sighing. Restful. And then the shaking stops.

But the feeling doesn't. Where the cold and the mt. took me and my body, I don't know. It stays on, in me. Now weeks later, it's still here. Another place I can be, put myself into. It's good. How long it lasts doesn't matter. I'm certain I can produce it again.

And it's more than physical. I look at many things now as if I'm turned sideways, from an angle I think others might not see and that I didn't have before. I won't explain all of what I see from there, because it won't necessarily mean anything to anyone.

At sunrise I don't go atop the crest to check what Manchas had heard--no necessity of spoiling the mystery, though no bear was definitely a disappointment. But I know two things. In a sense, the mt. has physically beaten me. And I let that mentally beat myself.

We are leaving, but both of us take some of the mt. with us. Manchas is a housedog, but since then, every night now he's reluctant to go inside. I think he wants me to sleep outside on the patio with him. I don't know why I haven't yet.

On the other hand, the beating I, at least, took had its other side, as already described. I take that from the mt. when we head straight down its side instead of returning on the longer route. Several times we slide, fall, strike things, but manage to not break anything.

A couple we pass on the trail call us early risers. "We spent the night up there." They look at us disbelievingly. That's fine.

I'd only gone twenty-four hours without food and wasn't really hungry, but stop at the Hungry Bear in Woodlawn Park. I eat only half of the delicious breakfast and drank half the juice. I'm usually a pig about a great meal but deliberately don't go there this time. But, believe me when I say you've got to eat there--blitzes, pastries, home-style cooking like restaurants used to serve. Before our decline in the world.

We take Colo. 76 to avoid civilization for as long as possible. People warn me about delays because of flooding and "the fire." They don't know to warn me about my reaction to them. Miles of road and acres of black naked trees on both sides. You turn a curve thinking you've seen the last of it, and there's another mountainside's worth of burned tree and almost bare ground.

My reaction disturbs me. I don't think of destroyed homes, family tragedies, lost income, ugly devastation. I see Nature. Earth's life cycles. Equilibrium returned to imbalance. I can't find compassion in myself for the "loss" suffered here. What happened just seems right. Maybe that's the mt. in me talking.

I haven't told you everything of my quasi-vision quest because this piece is long enough. Mine obviously differed from tatiana's; hers reads of the real and the true believer. If you haven't yet, do check her post for something further out than mine.

I end with sitting out on the patio a few days ago. A hawk flies over Manchas and I, coming to rest twenty feet up in one of my trees. He stays for minutes, long enough for my wife Carmen to hear my yelling and come out to see it, so I wasn't imagining it. Hawk stays longer than you might imagine. He's wonderful. I see him again soaring on other days. I can hope he'll decide to nest in that same tree. Who knows--maybe the mt. sent him to remind me.

Not that I can forget.

RudyG

Myths, Fairy Tales, and Other Lies About Writing

The day I wrote this a ghostly pall hung over the city. We woke coughing and feeling vaguely asthmatic. During my morning run a yellow haze sheathed the sun. Some had sore throats, headaches, or itchy eyes. Smoke from the L.A. fires had surrounded us. By afternoon I could see from my office window that the wind-blown evidence of California’s latest disaster had settled in Denver’s trees like lost West Coast fog. I wrote about writing, maybe to clear my head?

________________________________

The first big untruth is that writing depends on inspiration, sometimes called a muse, often referred to as the right conditions, whatever those may be. If that were true, would anything ever be written? Maybe it’s that I didn’t recognize my muse when she or he or it appeared. The fly buzzing around my computer? The spam email that appeared from nowhere? The dog-eared but embarrassingly empty notebook that sits on my desk, challenging me to fill it with dialog, plots, and character sketches?

No, writing requires ambition – lack of laziness. Just do it. Ambition is defined as an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power; a desire to achieve a particular end; or a desire for activity or exertion. Any of those will work. You gotta want it, and want it bad. A half-hearted writer will produce half-assed writing. A well-exercised imagination helps; good grammar is nice; a growing vocabulary is essential. But none of that matters without the desire to achieve the particular end of writing. Ambition defeats writer’s block every time.

Next, the fairy tale that some writers, including myself, have propagated and nourished in response to questions such as “Have you ever been surprised by what your characters do or say?” And the writer responds, “My characters just took over and all I could do was go along for the ride. They developed a life of their own.” My wife smirked when she first heard that from me, even though I may have convinced myself that it was true. I’ll admit that I do not always see where my writing will end up; that characters may enter stories on the fly, without any preconceived plan on my part; and that I have been surprised by twists in my stories as much as any reader. But it all comes from my head, the product of hard, gut-wrenching labor, and not romantic notions of magical forces guiding my pen or keyboard. Does that sound harsh, maybe too business-like and not cozy-armchair-honey-sweetened-tea enough? Blame it on the smoke.

I love to talk about my books, stories, poems, anything I have written. I can go on for hours about my output, and have, but only after the books have been written. Some writers will say that talking about their current projects helps -- maybe that works for them. Not for me. It can be a big mistake to talk about something that hasn’t been written yet. What is imagined by the writer never can be completely duplicated on the page. It’s perfect in our imaginations, of course. Talking about it before it hits that page only exacerbates the problem. I don't mean using a critique group or a reader to help with the editing to take the writing to the next level. But such assistance comes into play only after the writer has spent a good deal of time on the actual writing and is ready for reactions and editing.

I’ve met numerous people over the years who have told me that they were writing, when what they meant was that they were thinking about writing. They have beautiful ideas for novels; an entire six-volume series ready to go in their heads; masses of details collected and thousands of notes scribbled and favorable support from family and friends; but they aren’t writers until they stare at that empty page or screen and put together a paragraph, a sentence, hell, the first word. And maybe even then they still aren’t writers.

Along those lines is the person who says that they have always wanted to write a book and one of these days maybe they will. As if writing a book is like deciding between walking and riding a bicycle – just a matter of choice. Please. Maybe there are people who can do that. On Monday they decide they are writers and on Tuesday they start writing. Didn't work that way for me.

Then there is the notion that writing is its own reward. This could be a half-truth (does that make it a whole lie?) The act of writing, of producing words that work together, is healthy. I am happier when I am writing. My mental well-being may depend on my ability to continue to write. But that’s only part of the story. The reward comes from knowing that someone else is reading my writing. I don’t need the feedback or the reviews or the public recognition, just the knowledge that because I have produced, someone else has picked up my product and used it. I'm not averse to getting paid, too, but that's always seemed like an extra to me. Maybe that's why I've never made much money from writing.

How about the readers who ask me when am I going to write another book – implying that they have already read all of my previously published books (they haven’t) and I am interfering with the necessary feeding of their reading jones? Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the gesture and realize that someone asking about a new book is far better than no one asking about any book. But the truth is that I am a writer so I am always writing. There isn’t a season for writing, no day of the week reserved for writers, no Writers Write Now month. I can’t turn it on and off. I don’t want to turn it on or off. I am hooked and ready for the net. The next book comes out when the next book is done, that’s really all I know. Other writers respond to contract deadlines or agent threats or editor demands or job responsibilities. I respond to sleepless nights when I cannot write and boring days when I don’t have the time to write. I respond to myself.

BEYOND MARGINS

The PEN/Beyond Margins Award celebrates outstanding books by writers of color published in the United States during the previous year. Sponsored by the Open Book Program, the Beyond Margins Award is one of the many ways in which the Open Book Program encourages racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities. The Open Book Committee works to increase the literature by, for, and about African, Arab, Asian, Caribbean, Latin, and Native Americans, and to establish access for these groups to the publishing industry. Its goal is to ensure that those who are the custodians of language and literature are representative of the American people. Honored for writing "outstanding books by writers of color," three authors will receive $1,000 and be featured at a December celebration. The three recipients are: Uwem Akpan for Say You're One of Them, Juan Felipe Herrera for Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, and Lily Hoang for Changing. National Book Critics Circle president Jane Ciabattari will host the 2009 Beyond Margins Celebration at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe (NYC) on December 2.

Later.

"Hello, I must be going...."

As Groucho sang, "I have come just to say I must be going." Compays, personal needs require that I take a new role with La Bloga, one where I will post as time and circumstances allow. I would still love to hear about your novel, poetry joint, your visual art, and I hope to continue to offer occasional interviews and personal rants. But the frequency will have to be much less often, at least for the near future. You can always contact me through my site: lisaalvarado.net, and lisa@lisaalvarado.net., and I hope you do.

I am hugely humbled and grateful for the chance to share my scribbling, my POV, to interview brilliant writers and review awe-inspiring work. La Bloga has given me a way to be up close and personal with the likes of Martín Espada, Demetria Martinez, Achy Obejas, Margo Tamez, Luis Rodriguez, and a galaxy of writers and artists. Although I hope to be here in a different way, you will be continue to be regaled, illuminated, challenged, entertained and delightfully provoked with the writing of : Annette Leal Mattern Viva Liz Vega! tatiana de la tierra Olga Garcia Echeverria Daniel Olivas Rene Colato Lainez Lydia Gil Manuel Ramos Ann Hagman Cardinal msedano.

I'd like to end this post with some quotes about that which I love best:

A poet can survive everything but a misprint. ~ Oscar Wilde

Poetry is not a profession, it is a destiny. ~ Mikhail Dudan

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. ~ William Hazlitt

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. ~ Percy Shelley

My favorite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September” because it actually tells you something. ~ Groucho Marx

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ~ Percy Byshe Shelley

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. ~ from Dead Poet's Society

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. ~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Hasta Pronto, Lisa Alvarado

THE INVISIBLE MOUNTAIN- EVA

René Colato Laínez


Hola, La Bloga readers, I highly recommend The Invisible Mountain. In this novel the author, Carolina De Robertis described the intense lives of three women: Pajarita, Eva and Salomé. Last week, Adriana Dominguez presented the first excerpt of the book on Voces.

In this second excerpt, we will learn about Eva. Next week, you can read the third excerpt on
Little Pink Book PR.


Author, Carolina De Robertis writes about Eva:

Montevideo, Uruguay, 1938: Eva is thirteen years old. After two years of working for a shoe salesman who abused her, she has rebelled against him and her parents, found a job in a fashionable café, and begun to spend her evenings with a group of aspiring poets.

The Invisible Mountain
Second Excerpt
Eva

Months and years would stretch and turn and she always pined for this: these nights; smoky, electric, succulent, ineffable; the feel of the red table under her hand (chipped and glossy, sticky underneath) as the poets dreamed and joked and boasted; the way the air stretched and shimmered after her second glass of wine; the conversations that coiled intricately through war to recent essays to the deepest meaning of life. A light shone through those nights that Eva could not define, that vanished if she sought it too directly, that gilded everything it touched—voices, faces, wineglass, table, words—with numinous honey. She grew to rely on it, trusting its power to ward off all that must be kept away—drabness, boredom, nightmares, the rage of home, the terror inside shoe stores and of Nazis in faraway lands. She was free inside its unseen sphere, and life became more possible. Surely the other poets felt it too: Joaquín, with his meticulous verses, knotted forehead, and arsenal of freshly sharpened pencils; Carlos, who smelled of shoe polish and stole moments at his father’s law firm to scrawl odes on legal files; the Well-Known Poet, with his amiable laugh and unkempt gray hair; Pepe, with his pointy chin and fast martinis; Andrés, with his lucid voice, sharp thoughts, sharp smile; and Beatriz, the kind of girl whose laugh poured like molasses, whose poems brimmed with maudlin nubile shepherdesses yearning for their errant gaucho men. Eva could have borne her poems if she did not also sit so close to Andrés.

“We’re changing the world, right, Andrés?” Beatriz said, twirling her hair on a slow finger.

“Poetry alone won’t change the world,” Andrés said. “But without it, where would we be? Stripped of mystery, passion, everything that urges us to stay awake despite the shit and pain of living. In a world full of war, we need it more than ever.”

Joaquín and Carlos murmured their agreement. The Well-Known Poet nodded behind his cigarette smoke. Andrés’ words mixed with the smoke, swirling around the table, imbibed on each poet’s breath. In a world full of war. Eva felt the smoke and bulk of the Admiral Graf Spee
within those words. It had been only a month since the German battle-ship had dragged its huge hard broken body into the port, seeking refuge, trailing fire and smoke and the toxic scent of battle. Uruguay was neutral. Uruguay was far from Europe. Uruguay had not been invaded the way Poland had last spring. But the Graf Spee came anyway, and so did the British ships that set it on fire. War’s fingers were very long and they stretched over the Atlantic and shook up her city the way a ghost’s cold fingers reach through a window and shudder you awake in your own bed. That’s how it was when Eva woke to Papá in the hall telling Tomás about the Graf Spee: the smoke was thick like—well, like—a big black blanket, all over the port, and up on the crane we were coughing like crazy, and I saw the Nazis standing on deck rigid like fucking toothpicks, like everything was fine, like they were breathing air from the fucking Alps. After the German captain gave up and sank his battleship to the bottom of the river, Eva dreamed of dead wet Nazis smashing her windows and crawling into her bed, cold and dripping, cutting her with shards of glass and ship and with their fingernails.

Andrés had written a sonnet called “Graf Spee’s Ghost” and it occurred to her that he might understand. She tapped his foot with hers. He smiled without looking at her.

“The things you say,” she told him later on their walk home. “The way you say them. Everybody listens.”

“It’s just talk.”

The heart of things, you touch it when you speak; somehow you shake and shift the flesh reality is made of. “It’s more than that.”

They walked home together every night, but never all the way to the door. They did not want to be discovered. Eva came to dread buying the family meat, because of the way Coco pinned her with doleful eyes.

“What happened to that son of mine? You, Eva, tell me! He barely even lives here anymore.”

We are told, Andrés wrote, that the world is made of burlap: / Coarse, enduring—when really it is gauze, / Layer upon layer, fine, fragile, infinite,/ We can see our fingers through it in the light.


Excerpted from THE INVISIBLE MOUNTAIN by Carolina de Robertis Copyright © 2009 by Carolina de Robertis. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Review: Amigoland. Hit List Reading.

Oscar Casares. Amigoland. NY: Little, Brown & Co., 2009.

ISBN 9780316159692

Michael Sedano

The first question a certain reader asks upon finishing the 357^th page of Oscar Casares’ Amigoland is, “what’s the point?”

A certain reader might be one who sees no warmth and humor in nursing homes. This certain reader has put a parent in a nursing home as that parent’s life ebbs away. Perhaps that parent has disappeared into dementia, gone the personality remembered across 60 years of growing up with a lively, alive, person who looks like, sounds like, and many ways acts like the patient sitting in a wheelchair, or restrained in a reclining bed, asking “why can’t I go home?” For such a reader, a nursing home is nothing but Hell. Smells. Hallways filled with wheelchaired old people sitting silently, some shaking, mumbling, others with vacant eyes staring at institutional greenish white walls. The overburdened staff expressing forced patience and strained kindness as they change a diaper or wipe an ass.

Turtles. That’s what Don Fidencio Rosales calls the women who sit silently watching emptily in his rest home. Fidencio is one of the lucky old. Ninety-two years old, a stroke has slowed him significantly. His children live away from Brownsville, except a daughter who can’t handle the old man’s needs, not even a visit. But he keeps an active alertness about him, much of the time. He feels victimized by the attendants, his daughter, and her husband “the son of a bitch”. Someone is stealing his few remaining possessions, he’s sure of it. And when his missing stuff turns up here and there, Don Fidencio is certain the staff just wants to blame him, make him feel inept.

Control, that’s what his life is all about. Lack of control. The staff—Fidencio cannot remember their names and assigns them identities such as The One With White Pants, or The One With Big Ones—decides when and what he eats, when he bathes, how he walks and where. At mealtime they insist he wear a bib. When Fidencio prefers a napkin tucked into his collar, they coax and cajole, and if he won’t cooperate he doesn’t eat. Punto final. Control.

Out of the blue one day comes Fidencio’s little brother, Don Celestino, twenty years Fidencio’s junior. Celestino is also losing parts of his memory and independence, but he lives in his own home, drives his own car, hears now and again from his kids, picks up the cleaning woman for weekly trysts. Socorro commutes daily from the other side to clean houses, once a week to Celestino’s, only to return to her mother’s house shared with a spinster aunt, to be blamed for being a childless widow.

It’s not that Celestino is not happy to be an old man having sex on demand with a late-thirties Mexicana. He’s not anxious to inform his daughter or the neighbors he’s taken a concubine, such a young one. Socorro’s mother and tía are just as disappointed that Socorro’s lover won’t come into the house but parks outside and honks his horn. Socorro, upset at being denied in this manner, learns of Celestino’s brother and inveigles her employer-lover to begin a relationship with that part of the Rosales clan, so she can fit into Celestino’s life other than merely his Viagra-powered darkened bedroom.

There’s a lot of familial strife filling the triumvirate. Fidencio with his environment. Celestino with his children. Socorro with her mother. They intersect in Fidencio’s memory of tales his tocayo grandfather used to spin. Celestino doubts Fidencio’s memory. Grandfather was kidnapped by indios, as a seven year old, from the rancho near Linares, carried north of the river, and abandoned there. It’s a tale the tocayos shared but Celestino--being so young by the time the grandfather was so old—has no memory other than family legend. Logically, how can this or that be true? Take me down there, Fidencio challenges. We’ll find the old rancho and prove it once and for all.

Author Oscar Casares stretches credibility when he has Celestino, abetted by Socorro, help Fidencio escape the rest home and take a bus journey from the frontera down into Linares in search of grandfather’s rancho and the legend of the little boy carried off by indios. Mexico’s generally a benevolent mother to the travelers. The journey is not without its potholes, but the three bumble their way past customs and the Army, and except for a pay toilet, find a hospitable welcome wherever they travel.

When Fidencio finally arrives at his goal, a place where Celestino can see for himself that the tales are no fiction but history, the author’s point begins to emerge. Dying well. This is a country for old men. And old women. And caring children.

Don Fidencio’s fate to spend his dying days in that hellhole rest home gets a reprieve. Don Celestino’s refusal to acknowledge Socorro’s legitimacy and importance in his life reaches a climax and he finds himself making the right decision. Socorro’s tether to frontera economics and a domineering matriarchy slackens with distance from those pernicious influences. She finds the immediacy of independence refreshingly liberating, never too old for a fresh start.

Amigoland is a fairy tale with a fairy tale ending. To a certain reader, it’s an antidote to the bitter actuality that took a parent, a reality perhaps in store for oneself. Shake that off. My dad used to warn, “pa’lla va la sombra.” True enough. But for now, kick off your shoes, pick up Amigoland, get into the story, smile with Fidencio, Celestino, and Socorro as they age their own way into whatever awaits them in their final days or years. Whatever time you have left, they learn, don’t muck it up.

Saturday Afternoon in Vroman's With Hit List Authors

What welcome news, an author event for Hit List taking place in mid-afternoon in Pasadena. Much as I appreciate the 3 p.m. start time for author readings, the small crowd may dissuade Vroman's from repeating this fortuitous scheduling in future. Indeed, I've attended SRO evening events in the independent bookseller.

A welcome feature of this Vroman's reading is the reliance upon the writers themselves. Vroman's agent welcomes the handful of customers and turns the event over to the writers who proceed without a moderator.

First up is Linda Quinn. Hit List, subtitled "the Best of Latino Mystery" may lead her to explain she's from both Mexican and Russian heritage.

Quinn sets the tone du jour, reading with quiet restraint. She takes her plot up to a key moment then stops. Wisely, she advertises her wares and tells her audience to buy the book to learn what happens next. Good tactic.

Alicia Gaspar de Alba reads next. She explains her El Paso roots inform her mystery writing, hence today's reading set in seamy environs of Juarez hoplessness. She reads with quiet power, though her experience as a university lecturer gives her presentation a telling professionalism. However, I begin to wonder if the audience will hear any of the drama that infuses the stories. Is Gaspar de Alba holding back, to sustain the style Quinn laid down as the mode of the day? The stomach-turning actions of her wanton characters lend themselves to greater interpretive range than she allows herself and I sit feeling deprived of a need for more vocal power.

Sandra Ramos O'Briant continues the technique of quiet understatement but with somewhat greater vocal variety and animation to her reading. The style brings a welcome freshness to the event, suggesting the book is not a "more of the same" literary collection, but something worth acquiring and having signed. It's a key style for the last reader of the day. An author's panel doesn't want an audience to ask "is this all there is?"

O'Briant also has put in significant preparation. Rather than read text straight from the book, she's printed out a manuscript. This is a grand idea for any reader. She can print in large type that allows the kind of superior eye contact she employs. This also reduces the chances of losing her place in the text when she looks up. O'Briant appears more comfortable with the setting, probably a factor of her personality, but surely reinforced by a reliable set of reading pages.

Apologies to both Ms. O'Briant and C.M.Mayo for misidentifying the one for the other in an earlier edition of this. I must have Mayo on the brain.

September's first Tuesday, fires burning, smoke pall hanging over my city. So it's not a Tuesday like any other Tuesday, but You Are Here. Thank you for visiting La Bloga.

mvs

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