Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts
Monday, November 19, 2012
Monday, November 28, 2011
Auxilio! The Mexican Dropout Rate
The New York Times published an article about the appalling dropout rate of Mexican high school students in New York City, which is the worst among Mexicans in the country. The numbers are horrible:
If the article is sad and shocking, the comments section is terrifying. So many hostile comments comparing the ignorant Mexicans with the progress-driven Asians, classic comments about sending everybody back, and Americans getting "the dregs", instead, I guess, of Nobel Prize winners.
Anybody who thinks that the NYT is only read by bleeding-heart liberals is in for a rude awakening. I was so offended by the hatred and hostility of the majority of the comments, that I chimed in:
Let me add that Mexico has a free education system ranging from elementary school to a postgraduate degree, but even a free education is something that many Mexicans cannot afford.
Twenty years ago, as I started my career in Hispanic advertising in New York, our agency was commissioned to create a public service campaign to address the issue of the Hispanic dropout rate in the city. In those days it wasn't yet about Mexicans, but still more than 50% of Hispanic students did not finish high school. We created a powerful campaign (TV, subway and bus shelter posters, radio) based on the poor prospects that young Hispanics faced if they did not continue their high school studies onto college. It was meant to shock them and their parents into thinking seriously about finishing school. It never saw the light of day because of squabbling between the different well-intentioned but politically correct social agencies that were supporting it, among them the United Federation of Teachers and I don't remember which Hispanic groups. We were heartbroken. We all thought it would have made a big splash.
The numbers among other graduating Hispanics seem to have risen since then, but the Mexican immigrants to the city are relative latecomers and something must be done to shake them out of their belief that work, not studying, is the most important value they can instill in their children.
The reasons for dropping out of high school here are many, but key are: an illegal status and fear by parents of deportation plus lack of serious opportunities for illegals, and lack of education and English skills by parents, who do not participate in the education of their children simply because they can't. I have always maintained that Hispanics who come to this country need to learn English. In fact, the big Spanish TV and radio channels, which have absolutely no educational or cultural programming, could include bilingual or English literacy programs for adults, if, as they claim, they are so invested in the well-being of the community. Hispanics are not going to desert them the minute they learn English. Why wouldn't they keep enjoying their favorite programs in Spanish?
Many of the NYT's commenters have a very negative perception of bilingualism. I don't think that having Spanish media or bilingual communications in Spanish is the only thing that keeps immigrants from learning the language. It helps of course, but bilingualism is something to be desired by everyone. In the anti-immigrant hysteria currently sweeping this country, defending bilingualism has become tantamount to invoking Satan, but speaking more than one language is always an advantage to anyone, including Americans who rely on the fact that their language dominates the world, and thus can't see why it is desirable to speak something other than English.
Bilingualism is a two way street, and just as Spanish speakers are aided by communications in Spanish, by the same token they can learn English through bilingual education and immersion. What keeps Mexican parents, who are key figures in their children's educational attainment, from learning English is their inexperience with learning in general. Learning a new language is already very hard for adults, and many Mexicans are at an even bigger disadvantage because of their extremely deficient educational level, which is a national disgrace. This, unfortunately, is the perfect storm that the article speaks about. Their neglect of education needs to be changed into an appreciation of education as a value of the highest priority.
Education makes you smarter. Let's say things are so bad that you may still only find a job washing dishes: if you speak two languages and you are educated, you will rise faster than someone who doesn't. This is not a hard message to understand. A strong work ethic is a great value to have, but education provides a wider net of opportunities and a true chance at progress. Imagine: with their hardworking ethos, plus a strong value in education, there is no limit to what Mexicans (as well as anybody else) can do.
If the article is sad and shocking, the comments section is terrifying. So many hostile comments comparing the ignorant Mexicans with the progress-driven Asians, classic comments about sending everybody back, and Americans getting "the dregs", instead, I guess, of Nobel Prize winners.
Anybody who thinks that the NYT is only read by bleeding-heart liberals is in for a rude awakening. I was so offended by the hatred and hostility of the majority of the comments, that I chimed in:
If you come from a country where poverty makes work, not education, the most significant social value, and you yourself had nothing but an elementary school education, if at all, it is hard for you to understand why education is so important. You place a much higher value on work, so that the family can survive. Unfortunately, many of the hardworking Mexican parents who come here are victims of these circumstances. If they barely had an education in their native language, how can they be expected to master two? How can they really comprehend what education means?John is a commenter who thinks that Americans are getting the dregs (that is, Mexicans) of the cream of the crop of immigrants.
If Mexico better educated its people and gave them more opportunities, there wouldn't be millions of Mexicans trying to make a better life for their families in this country. But it is in the interest of the ruling Mexican elites to keep Mexicans poor and ignorant. The government has to deal with millions less people, and wages can be kept miserly, all because the majority of Mexicans can't really afford to have an education.
Don't blame the immigrants. And don't blame bilingualism. Bilingualism can be a solution if it helps Mexican parents learn English, so they can participate in the education of their children.
John, 23: these people are not the dregs. Without their hard work and cheap labor, who else would Americans like you exploit?
Let me add that Mexico has a free education system ranging from elementary school to a postgraduate degree, but even a free education is something that many Mexicans cannot afford.
Twenty years ago, as I started my career in Hispanic advertising in New York, our agency was commissioned to create a public service campaign to address the issue of the Hispanic dropout rate in the city. In those days it wasn't yet about Mexicans, but still more than 50% of Hispanic students did not finish high school. We created a powerful campaign (TV, subway and bus shelter posters, radio) based on the poor prospects that young Hispanics faced if they did not continue their high school studies onto college. It was meant to shock them and their parents into thinking seriously about finishing school. It never saw the light of day because of squabbling between the different well-intentioned but politically correct social agencies that were supporting it, among them the United Federation of Teachers and I don't remember which Hispanic groups. We were heartbroken. We all thought it would have made a big splash.
The numbers among other graduating Hispanics seem to have risen since then, but the Mexican immigrants to the city are relative latecomers and something must be done to shake them out of their belief that work, not studying, is the most important value they can instill in their children.
The reasons for dropping out of high school here are many, but key are: an illegal status and fear by parents of deportation plus lack of serious opportunities for illegals, and lack of education and English skills by parents, who do not participate in the education of their children simply because they can't. I have always maintained that Hispanics who come to this country need to learn English. In fact, the big Spanish TV and radio channels, which have absolutely no educational or cultural programming, could include bilingual or English literacy programs for adults, if, as they claim, they are so invested in the well-being of the community. Hispanics are not going to desert them the minute they learn English. Why wouldn't they keep enjoying their favorite programs in Spanish?
Many of the NYT's commenters have a very negative perception of bilingualism. I don't think that having Spanish media or bilingual communications in Spanish is the only thing that keeps immigrants from learning the language. It helps of course, but bilingualism is something to be desired by everyone. In the anti-immigrant hysteria currently sweeping this country, defending bilingualism has become tantamount to invoking Satan, but speaking more than one language is always an advantage to anyone, including Americans who rely on the fact that their language dominates the world, and thus can't see why it is desirable to speak something other than English.
Bilingualism is a two way street, and just as Spanish speakers are aided by communications in Spanish, by the same token they can learn English through bilingual education and immersion. What keeps Mexican parents, who are key figures in their children's educational attainment, from learning English is their inexperience with learning in general. Learning a new language is already very hard for adults, and many Mexicans are at an even bigger disadvantage because of their extremely deficient educational level, which is a national disgrace. This, unfortunately, is the perfect storm that the article speaks about. Their neglect of education needs to be changed into an appreciation of education as a value of the highest priority.
Education makes you smarter. Let's say things are so bad that you may still only find a job washing dishes: if you speak two languages and you are educated, you will rise faster than someone who doesn't. This is not a hard message to understand. A strong work ethic is a great value to have, but education provides a wider net of opportunities and a true chance at progress. Imagine: with their hardworking ethos, plus a strong value in education, there is no limit to what Mexicans (as well as anybody else) can do.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Más Respeto, Por Favor.
The new, astonishing figures for the Hispanic population in the US:
I find this very interesting. There are almost 32 million Mexicans in the US. The next large group is Puerto Ricans, with almost 5 million people, and the next, Cubans, with almost 2 million. Although Mexicans are six times as many as the next big group, for some reason they seem to be under served and under represented. Other groups, like the Cubans in Miami, make much more noise and seem to have far more political clout, even though they are actually less relevant. Here in the East Coast, Mexicans are almost invisible. We see them cooking and delivering our food, but otherwise, they don't make a political racket. They barely have political representation. My guess is that recent arrivals come from poverty and are severely undereducated. They are concerned about surviving, sending money to their families, and they are not used to having a political voice. They have been abandoned by their own government at home and they are not about to trust the one here. I hope that with new generations of Mexican kids born in America this will change. I'm hoping that they will integrate better and get to be Supreme Court judges, mayors, presidents of this country. They need to get out of the ghetto. And for this, they all need to learn English.
When I arrived in New York in 1992, the Hispanic advertising business in the East Coast was run by people from Cuban or Puerto Rican origin. There were a only a handful of Mexicans working in this industry and being Mexican turned out to be a huge asset for my career. I always resented, and still do, that every time I wrote copy, someone would ask if a person who wasn't Mexican would understand it. Not that I was writing Mexican slang, but once in a while, a legitimate Spanish word that was perfectly commonplace in Mexico would jump out at people. Some thought that Mexicans were too uneducated to understand perfectly commonplace words (there was a lot of ignorant prejudice from some quarters and there still is. Some people like to feel superior to Mexicans, because of race, economic status and education levels). In my mind, I was writing for the majority even then, and the majority rules. I still feel the same way. If the communication is national, it should speak to the majority. If it is regional; that is, if it's only going to air in Miami, then do it in Cuban and let the minority get used to it. Native speakers, whatever their country of origin, are deeply sensitive to regional accents. So in Miami they are used to Cuban, as in the Southwest and California they are used to Mexican, and here in the East Coast, to the Spanish spoken in the Caribbean islands. I believe that there is a neutral Spanish accent that is perfectly fine, and this is the neutral Mexican accent, which pronounces all the consonants, and which, without the melody, is as neutral as the Colombian accent from Bogotá, without the singsong. And whoever doesn't like this, should take a look at the numbers above and zip it.
One of the problems I have with the "Hispanic" market, is that because we strive to include everybody, the Spanish language that we use in mass communications has become impoverished. It is hard to write ads with humor, not because it is impossible, but because someone will always question whether the others will understand it. Advertising and marketing categorize people into targets until it dehumanizes them, as if people from different national origins are inscrutable aliens from a different galaxy that have no connection either to one another or to the rest of humanity. This results in people looking at every word in a sentence as if it was devoid of context. As if the way we speak is by understanding every single word in a sentence separately, without connection to what precedes it or what follows. In short, common sense leaves the building.
Let me give an example: popular idioms and expressions enrich communication. They are part of our culture. So if I want to use an expression like "sale más caro el caldo que las albóndigas", "the broth ends up costing more than the meatballs", which means something similar to "pound wise and penny foolish", everybody understands the gist of it, but it will have to go through a gauntlet of people who will admit they understand it, and even like it, but they are afraid that someone from the Dominican Republic might not. You can rest assured that it will never go on air. This is, among other reasons, why you can barely find good commercials in Spanish in the US.
The Spanish now used in mass communications in the US is for the most part an insipid, generic language that has no personality, no bite, no irony. Often times, it is sloppy and grammatically incorrect, or it is a lazy, literal translation of English idioms. As I was trapped in Cancún by hurricane Irene, I was watching the coverage on CNN en Español. I was appalled at the poverty of the Spanish of the newscasters and reporters. They sounded like nothing recognizable because for the most part they were speaking in some sort of awkward, literal Spanish translation of English; whenever they didn't know a word in Spanish, which was very often, they just said it in English. I cannot understand how a network with the resources of CNN can't hire good journalists, reporters and anchors who are native speakers of Spanish, and are fully bilingual and know the structural differences between the two languages. They can't be that hard to find.
The problem is bigger than advertising. Since this is not a Hispanic country, we don't have a solid literary and verbal culture. Our Spanish is poor. Children at school do not learn poems, songs, expressions, games, and literature in Spanish. We don't have good Hispanic-American literary writers who write in Spanish. We barely have a handful of good Hispanic-American writers who write in English. Our TV channels are a disgrace in terms of content. There is no cultural content. Newspapers and magazines leave much to be desired. And advertising, which in its best form should contribute to pop culture, is for the most part lame, artificial, generic and it belongs to no one. By trying to include everyone, it really speaks to no one.
So I have two points to make:
1. Our Spanish sucks, and we should do something to improve it. Making it generic makes it poorer.
2. Because there are almost six times as many Mexicans as any other Latins in this country, Mexican-influenced Spanish should be the language used to speak to the majority of Hispanics in the US.*
*By the way, if there was a Spanish-speaking majority from another country, I would stand by this, as much as it may pain me. It's only fair.
I find this very interesting. There are almost 32 million Mexicans in the US. The next large group is Puerto Ricans, with almost 5 million people, and the next, Cubans, with almost 2 million. Although Mexicans are six times as many as the next big group, for some reason they seem to be under served and under represented. Other groups, like the Cubans in Miami, make much more noise and seem to have far more political clout, even though they are actually less relevant. Here in the East Coast, Mexicans are almost invisible. We see them cooking and delivering our food, but otherwise, they don't make a political racket. They barely have political representation. My guess is that recent arrivals come from poverty and are severely undereducated. They are concerned about surviving, sending money to their families, and they are not used to having a political voice. They have been abandoned by their own government at home and they are not about to trust the one here. I hope that with new generations of Mexican kids born in America this will change. I'm hoping that they will integrate better and get to be Supreme Court judges, mayors, presidents of this country. They need to get out of the ghetto. And for this, they all need to learn English.
When I arrived in New York in 1992, the Hispanic advertising business in the East Coast was run by people from Cuban or Puerto Rican origin. There were a only a handful of Mexicans working in this industry and being Mexican turned out to be a huge asset for my career. I always resented, and still do, that every time I wrote copy, someone would ask if a person who wasn't Mexican would understand it. Not that I was writing Mexican slang, but once in a while, a legitimate Spanish word that was perfectly commonplace in Mexico would jump out at people. Some thought that Mexicans were too uneducated to understand perfectly commonplace words (there was a lot of ignorant prejudice from some quarters and there still is. Some people like to feel superior to Mexicans, because of race, economic status and education levels). In my mind, I was writing for the majority even then, and the majority rules. I still feel the same way. If the communication is national, it should speak to the majority. If it is regional; that is, if it's only going to air in Miami, then do it in Cuban and let the minority get used to it. Native speakers, whatever their country of origin, are deeply sensitive to regional accents. So in Miami they are used to Cuban, as in the Southwest and California they are used to Mexican, and here in the East Coast, to the Spanish spoken in the Caribbean islands. I believe that there is a neutral Spanish accent that is perfectly fine, and this is the neutral Mexican accent, which pronounces all the consonants, and which, without the melody, is as neutral as the Colombian accent from Bogotá, without the singsong. And whoever doesn't like this, should take a look at the numbers above and zip it.
One of the problems I have with the "Hispanic" market, is that because we strive to include everybody, the Spanish language that we use in mass communications has become impoverished. It is hard to write ads with humor, not because it is impossible, but because someone will always question whether the others will understand it. Advertising and marketing categorize people into targets until it dehumanizes them, as if people from different national origins are inscrutable aliens from a different galaxy that have no connection either to one another or to the rest of humanity. This results in people looking at every word in a sentence as if it was devoid of context. As if the way we speak is by understanding every single word in a sentence separately, without connection to what precedes it or what follows. In short, common sense leaves the building.
Let me give an example: popular idioms and expressions enrich communication. They are part of our culture. So if I want to use an expression like "sale más caro el caldo que las albóndigas", "the broth ends up costing more than the meatballs", which means something similar to "pound wise and penny foolish", everybody understands the gist of it, but it will have to go through a gauntlet of people who will admit they understand it, and even like it, but they are afraid that someone from the Dominican Republic might not. You can rest assured that it will never go on air. This is, among other reasons, why you can barely find good commercials in Spanish in the US.
The Spanish now used in mass communications in the US is for the most part an insipid, generic language that has no personality, no bite, no irony. Often times, it is sloppy and grammatically incorrect, or it is a lazy, literal translation of English idioms. As I was trapped in Cancún by hurricane Irene, I was watching the coverage on CNN en Español. I was appalled at the poverty of the Spanish of the newscasters and reporters. They sounded like nothing recognizable because for the most part they were speaking in some sort of awkward, literal Spanish translation of English; whenever they didn't know a word in Spanish, which was very often, they just said it in English. I cannot understand how a network with the resources of CNN can't hire good journalists, reporters and anchors who are native speakers of Spanish, and are fully bilingual and know the structural differences between the two languages. They can't be that hard to find.
The problem is bigger than advertising. Since this is not a Hispanic country, we don't have a solid literary and verbal culture. Our Spanish is poor. Children at school do not learn poems, songs, expressions, games, and literature in Spanish. We don't have good Hispanic-American literary writers who write in Spanish. We barely have a handful of good Hispanic-American writers who write in English. Our TV channels are a disgrace in terms of content. There is no cultural content. Newspapers and magazines leave much to be desired. And advertising, which in its best form should contribute to pop culture, is for the most part lame, artificial, generic and it belongs to no one. By trying to include everyone, it really speaks to no one.
So I have two points to make:
1. Our Spanish sucks, and we should do something to improve it. Making it generic makes it poorer.
2. Because there are almost six times as many Mexicans as any other Latins in this country, Mexican-influenced Spanish should be the language used to speak to the majority of Hispanics in the US.*
*By the way, if there was a Spanish-speaking majority from another country, I would stand by this, as much as it may pain me. It's only fair.
Friday, July 03, 2009
More Literary Fun
I got this on Facebook. It's purportedly by Oscar Wilde:
"Just be yourself. Everybody else is taken".
He was the best.
"Just be yourself. Everybody else is taken".
He was the best.
Edith Wharton Accused of Being Too Smart
And rightly so. A social newspaper reported on her breakup with her first fiancee:
"The only reason for the breaking of the engagement.. is an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride."
Probably the best accusation ever.
"The only reason for the breaking of the engagement.. is an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride."
Probably the best accusation ever.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Eat Pray Love
I was given as a birthday present this book called Eat, Pray, Love, a mega bestseller. It's the journey of self discovery of a self-involved, navel gazing woman, who, despite all of her discoveries, seems to be as self-involved and navel-gazing at the end of the book as she was at the beginning. Except before she was miserable, and after pasta in Italy, ashram in India and magic man in Bali, she is happy. (I would have had the pasta in Italy and left it at that). I hope my dear friend Sonia will forgive me for not liking this book. My eyes rolled so many times on every page, I was beginning to feel like that girl from The Exorcist. However, I couldn't put it down. Not because it was suspenseful or I wanted to know what was going to happen, but because it was so fascinatingly appalling, I just had to see it through. The writing seemed to me sloppy and witless and not particularly insightful or well observed (I guess powers of observation must be quite limited when you are gazing at your navel with such focussed concentration). But the book did give me something very useful. It actually gave me a meditation mantra. Readers, do not panic. I have not yet gone out of my spirituality-hating wits. But all of us, and particularly those of us for whom life is a catastrophe waiting to happen, can sometimes benefit from a little peace of mind. I have tried a couple of mantras here and there, mainly to lull myself to sleep, and the one the writer shares in this book is the only one that actually seems to work. So for that, I'm grateful to her.
If you must know, I am also learning Tai Chi. Soon I will be dispensing wisdom from a cave in a mountain.
If you must know, I am also learning Tai Chi. Soon I will be dispensing wisdom from a cave in a mountain.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Now I feel really bad...
...for raining acrimony on that poor, sweet girl who uses the internet to talk about her most private hopes and dreams. And who, regardless of the invective she has unleashed upon herself from sundry put upon readers, will probably parlay these notorious 15 minutes into many more profitable minutes for years to come. Unfortunately, this kind of inane confessional shtick works like a charm in America, especially when it comes from young, cute and tattooed writerettes.
If you feel a whiff of envy wafting across your computer screen, well yes, of course (except for the tattoos. Yuck.)
And so, in the spirit of empathy with navelgazing writers everywhere, I will share with you, my dear readers, mon semblables, mon freres, something of a deeply personal nature:
I have a very good reason to navel gaze today. I have a horrible rash across my entire torso and the back of my neck. It's very red and it itches like a mother.
I have 4 theories of why this is happening on a day when I should be out basking in the sun, enjoying the holiday in which we are supposed to remember the war dead, as our brain dead President urges us (but not think too much of those who are in the process of being freshly killed).
1. It's punishment for being so horrible to Emily Gould.
2. (and from here on the theories are much more likely):
Sun rash, or as they elegantly call it on WebMd, photosensitivity. My tofu-colored complexion had not been in the sun for eons and as I went for an enjoyable bicycle ride yesterday and read the NY Times in the park, I was attacked by the sun, despite the fact that I was wearing SPF 45.
3. Contact dermatitis, a byproduct of the above mentioned sunscreen and another cream I slathered on after I took a shower. This is unlikely, as my extremities, which were covered with SPF, are the only part of my body that does not look like a school of shrimp.
4. The crab and pork soup dumplings at Joe's Shanghai. I never eat those because my dining companions never want to order them, but yesterday the brave (and actual talented writer) Mercedes Cebrián, on her farewell lunch from a whirlwind tour of the States, was happy to oblige. I am not allergic to shellfish, that I know of, but I guess it's never too late to start. However, we are wary of blaming Joe's Shanghai for anything, as it is the temple where we suck at the teat of nirvana.
My guess is I was attacked by Helios, mercifully early into the season, yet as a warning to not even attempt to show myself in the bright light of Summer if not covered by something resembling a burka.
Just so you know, calamine lotion made it worse. If any of you have any conspiracy theories of your own 0r any idea of what I need to do to end this dermatological ordeal, your comments will be greatly appreciated.
If you feel a whiff of envy wafting across your computer screen, well yes, of course (except for the tattoos. Yuck.)
And so, in the spirit of empathy with navelgazing writers everywhere, I will share with you, my dear readers, mon semblables, mon freres, something of a deeply personal nature:
I have a very good reason to navel gaze today. I have a horrible rash across my entire torso and the back of my neck. It's very red and it itches like a mother.
I have 4 theories of why this is happening on a day when I should be out basking in the sun, enjoying the holiday in which we are supposed to remember the war dead, as our brain dead President urges us (but not think too much of those who are in the process of being freshly killed).
1. It's punishment for being so horrible to Emily Gould.
2. (and from here on the theories are much more likely):
Sun rash, or as they elegantly call it on WebMd, photosensitivity. My tofu-colored complexion had not been in the sun for eons and as I went for an enjoyable bicycle ride yesterday and read the NY Times in the park, I was attacked by the sun, despite the fact that I was wearing SPF 45.
3. Contact dermatitis, a byproduct of the above mentioned sunscreen and another cream I slathered on after I took a shower. This is unlikely, as my extremities, which were covered with SPF, are the only part of my body that does not look like a school of shrimp.
4. The crab and pork soup dumplings at Joe's Shanghai. I never eat those because my dining companions never want to order them, but yesterday the brave (and actual talented writer) Mercedes Cebrián, on her farewell lunch from a whirlwind tour of the States, was happy to oblige. I am not allergic to shellfish, that I know of, but I guess it's never too late to start. However, we are wary of blaming Joe's Shanghai for anything, as it is the temple where we suck at the teat of nirvana.
My guess is I was attacked by Helios, mercifully early into the season, yet as a warning to not even attempt to show myself in the bright light of Summer if not covered by something resembling a burka.
Just so you know, calamine lotion made it worse. If any of you have any conspiracy theories of your own 0r any idea of what I need to do to end this dermatological ordeal, your comments will be greatly appreciated.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Phillip Gourevitch is my boyfriend
He doesn't know it, of course, but this shouldn't be a problem. I'm in love with his brain.
Yesterday, we heard him speak, together with Errol Morris, about Standard Operation Procedure, the book by my boyfriend and the documentary film of the same name by Morris. I have seen the movie and written about how it should be required viewing for every American citizen. I have not read the book, but I'm sure that coming from my boyfriend, it is amazing. The question is, will someone buy it? Our moral degradation is so huge that it is hard to muster the courage to read or watch these things. I saw Morris' film because I am a huge fan of his movies. I really want to read my boyfriend's book, but it is just too painful (I have yet to read his amazing book on Rwanda. After yesterday, it is next on my list).
Phillip and Morris were great, and they spoke about the differences in the two works. How Morris concentrated on the problem of the photographs and Gourevitch was taken by the language of the interviews with the Americans at Abu Ghraib. They also both seem to have enormous empathy for the soldiers who took the pictures and were prosecuted. This sparked an interesting debate about whether the taking of the photographs itself was a crime.
Unfortunately the talk was moderated by a professional idiot (as happens regularly in such events) who apparently was a British diplomat who went to Iraq. For a diplomat, he was horrifyingly vulgar, stupid and aggressive. His was the cheapest possible way to provoke argument, which is by spouting politically correct idiocies, like asking whether continuing to show the photographs, which Morris does in abundance in the film, is not continuing to dehumanize the victims. Imagine someone having this complaint about pictures of the Holocaust or other horrific human rights violations. The pictures serve a purpose, not to dehumanize, but to open our eyes and to foment the outrage that we should all be feeling. As my boyfriend said, showing the pictures is a public service. He said that taking them was a public service, even if in many cases it was not intended to be. I disagree with both Phillip and Errol in that they seem too lenient with the soldiers, but they have taken it upon themselves to enlighten us about conditions in which American soldiers are abused by their superiors and degraded to such an extent, that their human decency deserts them.
I also have to say this: the New York Public Library organizes very interesting talks. However, I don't go to most of them because they involve having to listen to that pretentious, insufferable windbag who runs the talks, Paul Holdengraber, the James Lipton of the literary set. Except he is worse. He stole 10 precious minutes of the talk by giving his unnecessary sophomoric mini lecture about what we were about to hear. For the life of me, I don't understand why he is where he is. Perhaps behind the scenes he gets the job done, but as a public speaker he is embarrassing. I tuned him out, but I did hear the word Kafka bandied about -- cheap literary namedropping, way below the level of the guests, and the audience present last night.
Yesterday, we heard him speak, together with Errol Morris, about Standard Operation Procedure, the book by my boyfriend and the documentary film of the same name by Morris. I have seen the movie and written about how it should be required viewing for every American citizen. I have not read the book, but I'm sure that coming from my boyfriend, it is amazing. The question is, will someone buy it? Our moral degradation is so huge that it is hard to muster the courage to read or watch these things. I saw Morris' film because I am a huge fan of his movies. I really want to read my boyfriend's book, but it is just too painful (I have yet to read his amazing book on Rwanda. After yesterday, it is next on my list).
Phillip and Morris were great, and they spoke about the differences in the two works. How Morris concentrated on the problem of the photographs and Gourevitch was taken by the language of the interviews with the Americans at Abu Ghraib. They also both seem to have enormous empathy for the soldiers who took the pictures and were prosecuted. This sparked an interesting debate about whether the taking of the photographs itself was a crime.
Unfortunately the talk was moderated by a professional idiot (as happens regularly in such events) who apparently was a British diplomat who went to Iraq. For a diplomat, he was horrifyingly vulgar, stupid and aggressive. His was the cheapest possible way to provoke argument, which is by spouting politically correct idiocies, like asking whether continuing to show the photographs, which Morris does in abundance in the film, is not continuing to dehumanize the victims. Imagine someone having this complaint about pictures of the Holocaust or other horrific human rights violations. The pictures serve a purpose, not to dehumanize, but to open our eyes and to foment the outrage that we should all be feeling. As my boyfriend said, showing the pictures is a public service. He said that taking them was a public service, even if in many cases it was not intended to be. I disagree with both Phillip and Errol in that they seem too lenient with the soldiers, but they have taken it upon themselves to enlighten us about conditions in which American soldiers are abused by their superiors and degraded to such an extent, that their human decency deserts them.
I also have to say this: the New York Public Library organizes very interesting talks. However, I don't go to most of them because they involve having to listen to that pretentious, insufferable windbag who runs the talks, Paul Holdengraber, the James Lipton of the literary set. Except he is worse. He stole 10 precious minutes of the talk by giving his unnecessary sophomoric mini lecture about what we were about to hear. For the life of me, I don't understand why he is where he is. Perhaps behind the scenes he gets the job done, but as a public speaker he is embarrassing. I tuned him out, but I did hear the word Kafka bandied about -- cheap literary namedropping, way below the level of the guests, and the audience present last night.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Eco Chamber
I forsook much more important obligations to go listen to Umberto Eco's fun lecture yesterday at the satanically designed Cooper Union. I got there early so I didn't have to sit behind a column, like a third of the audience. I think it is very lovely that these Freedom to Write lectures are held where Abe Lincoln once spoke, but the hall sucks. Note to organizers: we are happy to forgo the meaningfulness of the location in favor of a better auditorium.
In any case, Maestro Eco did not disappoint with his playfulness and his erudition (rendered "lite" for the sake of the discerning audience). He basically posited that there are truths in fiction that are absolute and unquestionable (no one will ever question that Anna Karenina commits suicide, or that Superman is Clark Kent, or that Hamlet and Ophelia do not get married and live happily ever after, etc); whereas in history facts can change the moment new sources are discovered. So certain facts of fiction are absolutely true, yet their interpretation is infinite. Still, interpretation has to be borne by the text. One cannot say that D'artagnan is gay, because that is nowhere in the text. Agreed.
Surprisingly, after the lecture, Adam Gopnik asked very good questions and got a very good conversation going with Eco. At one point Gopnik mentioned to Eco that in critical studies in American colleges, you can learn theories that say that Superman is not really Clark Kent but a fantasy of Lois Lane. To which Eco replied that this is "an American disease": the misunderstanding of deconstruction as a free for all. He got a big ovation on that one. He also got into a very funny and fast riff about characters that live outside the page forever, something about hypertextuality that had Hester Prynne marrying Ishmael and someone being sold as a slave to Scarlett O'Hara. This gave me an idea for a short movie! Which is why one goes to these things. To fire up the neurons.
Eco said that all human knowledge, including science, is communicated as narrative. He also talked about the new paradigm of knowledge that is the web. He didn't seem to be too alarmed by the nature of the web, but he said that the problem with the internet is that the art of discrimination has been lost, and that this is an art that should be taught at schools, because people have no way of knowing what is a reliable source and what isn't. To the question of whether in Europe there is hostility and fear against the onslaught of English, he replied that the internet has also allowed people everywhere to come in contact with all other languages in the world, and that languages are biological and they do whatever they please (whatever this means).
He told a funny story. His translator to Russian called to ask him once "how do you say the word mafia in Italian?" And also that story about Bush having gone to France and noticed that the French do not have a word for "entrepeneur".
Eco steered totally clear of politics and devoted his very entertaining talk to literature and what it does for us. It teaches us how to die, he said. When Gopnik asked him if he cared to talk about the state of America today, he gave a pregnant and very funny pause and then answered that a man that lives in the Italy of Berlusconi has no right to comment on what goes on here.
He was delightful and I bet he is an amazing lecturer in academy. I wish I could go to his classes.
In any case, Maestro Eco did not disappoint with his playfulness and his erudition (rendered "lite" for the sake of the discerning audience). He basically posited that there are truths in fiction that are absolute and unquestionable (no one will ever question that Anna Karenina commits suicide, or that Superman is Clark Kent, or that Hamlet and Ophelia do not get married and live happily ever after, etc); whereas in history facts can change the moment new sources are discovered. So certain facts of fiction are absolutely true, yet their interpretation is infinite. Still, interpretation has to be borne by the text. One cannot say that D'artagnan is gay, because that is nowhere in the text. Agreed.
Surprisingly, after the lecture, Adam Gopnik asked very good questions and got a very good conversation going with Eco. At one point Gopnik mentioned to Eco that in critical studies in American colleges, you can learn theories that say that Superman is not really Clark Kent but a fantasy of Lois Lane. To which Eco replied that this is "an American disease": the misunderstanding of deconstruction as a free for all. He got a big ovation on that one. He also got into a very funny and fast riff about characters that live outside the page forever, something about hypertextuality that had Hester Prynne marrying Ishmael and someone being sold as a slave to Scarlett O'Hara. This gave me an idea for a short movie! Which is why one goes to these things. To fire up the neurons.
Eco said that all human knowledge, including science, is communicated as narrative. He also talked about the new paradigm of knowledge that is the web. He didn't seem to be too alarmed by the nature of the web, but he said that the problem with the internet is that the art of discrimination has been lost, and that this is an art that should be taught at schools, because people have no way of knowing what is a reliable source and what isn't. To the question of whether in Europe there is hostility and fear against the onslaught of English, he replied that the internet has also allowed people everywhere to come in contact with all other languages in the world, and that languages are biological and they do whatever they please (whatever this means).
He told a funny story. His translator to Russian called to ask him once "how do you say the word mafia in Italian?" And also that story about Bush having gone to France and noticed that the French do not have a word for "entrepeneur".
Eco steered totally clear of politics and devoted his very entertaining talk to literature and what it does for us. It teaches us how to die, he said. When Gopnik asked him if he cared to talk about the state of America today, he gave a pregnant and very funny pause and then answered that a man that lives in the Italy of Berlusconi has no right to comment on what goes on here.
He was delightful and I bet he is an amazing lecturer in academy. I wish I could go to his classes.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
The Three Musketeers
That is, Umberto Eco, Mario Vargas Llosa and Salman Rushdie, happily riffing away on as Rushdie said, good bad books that (as Eco said) make great myths, until the moderator curtailed their amazing improvised banter.
Note to the organizers for next time: Writers of this caliber do not need a moderator. They can have an amazingly enlightening, jazzy discussion all by themselves without the need of someone who sounds like he has painstakingly done his homework. It is to the credit of these three guys that even when the moderator threatened to abscond with all the fun and sparks, they gave a very spirited talk and still kept it light, engaging and relevant.
It was about language (Europanto, anyone?), the political relevance of writers, the flexibility of English, the death of Latin and birth of romance languages, the bad/good novels of Alexandre Dumas, and the fledgling movie career of Salman Rushdie, among other things.
A delightful evening, but one that should not have been moderated at all.
Note to the organizers for next time: Writers of this caliber do not need a moderator. They can have an amazingly enlightening, jazzy discussion all by themselves without the need of someone who sounds like he has painstakingly done his homework. It is to the credit of these three guys that even when the moderator threatened to abscond with all the fun and sparks, they gave a very spirited talk and still kept it light, engaging and relevant.
It was about language (Europanto, anyone?), the political relevance of writers, the flexibility of English, the death of Latin and birth of romance languages, the bad/good novels of Alexandre Dumas, and the fledgling movie career of Salman Rushdie, among other things.
A delightful evening, but one that should not have been moderated at all.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Department of Stomach Ailments + Book Reviews
I'm relegated to stay home with a case of an unwanted guest crashing in my bowels since yesterday, courtesy of a wilted looking Cobb salad at the corner diner. (See? This is what happens for eating healthy). I'm contemplating calling the health department, but I don't want to leave any Mexican cooks and busboys out of a job.
My fever has subsided (and with it the chills and body aches -- Tylenol works!), but the guest is still here, and partying like there is no tomorrow, keeping me by force, close to the loo. Department of too much info, I know, but this pesky little creature does not allow me to concentrate on loftier topics.
You also must know that we Mexicans consider it perfectly normal, socially acceptable and indeed a daily occurrence, to talk in great length about our bowels and their discontents. It's in my blood.
So, instead of basking in the glorious Spring weather, like the rest of you, I have been able to continue reading The Russians' Debutante Handbook, by Gary Shteyngart. I know this book may be old hat to many of you, but I just discovered it ($5 at Strand) and I'm getting such a kick out of it, I think I am in love with Mr. Shteyngart.
1. He is hilarious. The satire is endlessly biting, no one is unscathed. It is cruel and comical, very precisely observed, and beautifully written.
2. He is not fond of Eastern Europe and its barbarities, and so I find a writer after my own heart. He sets the novel in a fictional city called Prava, which is transparently Prague, and his expert skewering of locals and expats alike is delightful. I'm having a ball reading this book. I have read books that make you laugh out loud more times per page, but this one just makes you shake your head and marvel at pretty much every sentence.
Next on my list, I guess, will be his second novel, Absurdistan.
Since we are on the subject of books, what else have I read lately?
Oh, yes. I was given as a birthday present this book called Eat, Pray, Love, a mega bestseller. It's the journey of self discovery of a self-involved, navel gazing woman, who, despite all of her discoveries, seems to be as self-involved and navel-gazing at the end of the book as she was at the beginning. Except before she was miserable, and after pasta in Italy, ashram in India and magic man in Bali, she is happy. (I would have had the pasta in Italy and left it at that). I hope my dear friend Sonia will forgive me for not liking this book. My eyes rolled so many times on every page, I was beginning to feel like that girl from The Exorcist. However, I couldn't put it down. Not because it was suspenseful or I wanted to know what was going to happen, but because it was so fascinatingly appalling, I just had to see it through. The writing seemed to me sloppy and witless and not particularly insightful or well observed (I guess powers of observation must be quite limited when you are gazing at your navel with such focussed concentration). But the book did give me something very useful. It actually gave me a meditation mantra. Readers, do not panic. I have not yet gone out of my spirituality-hating wits. But all of us, and particularly those of us for whom life is a catastrophe waiting to happen, can sometimes benefit from a little peace of mind. I have tried a couple of mantras here and there, mainly to lull myself to sleep, and the one the writer shares in this book is the only one that actually seems to work. So for that, I'm grateful to her.
If you must know, I am also learning Tai Chi. Soon I will be dispensing wisdom from a cave in a mountain.
For the time being, however, I am as grounded as possible, wishing my unwelcome squatter a hasty departure.
My fever has subsided (and with it the chills and body aches -- Tylenol works!), but the guest is still here, and partying like there is no tomorrow, keeping me by force, close to the loo. Department of too much info, I know, but this pesky little creature does not allow me to concentrate on loftier topics.
You also must know that we Mexicans consider it perfectly normal, socially acceptable and indeed a daily occurrence, to talk in great length about our bowels and their discontents. It's in my blood.
So, instead of basking in the glorious Spring weather, like the rest of you, I have been able to continue reading The Russians' Debutante Handbook, by Gary Shteyngart. I know this book may be old hat to many of you, but I just discovered it ($5 at Strand) and I'm getting such a kick out of it, I think I am in love with Mr. Shteyngart.
1. He is hilarious. The satire is endlessly biting, no one is unscathed. It is cruel and comical, very precisely observed, and beautifully written.
2. He is not fond of Eastern Europe and its barbarities, and so I find a writer after my own heart. He sets the novel in a fictional city called Prava, which is transparently Prague, and his expert skewering of locals and expats alike is delightful. I'm having a ball reading this book. I have read books that make you laugh out loud more times per page, but this one just makes you shake your head and marvel at pretty much every sentence.
Next on my list, I guess, will be his second novel, Absurdistan.
Since we are on the subject of books, what else have I read lately?
Oh, yes. I was given as a birthday present this book called Eat, Pray, Love, a mega bestseller. It's the journey of self discovery of a self-involved, navel gazing woman, who, despite all of her discoveries, seems to be as self-involved and navel-gazing at the end of the book as she was at the beginning. Except before she was miserable, and after pasta in Italy, ashram in India and magic man in Bali, she is happy. (I would have had the pasta in Italy and left it at that). I hope my dear friend Sonia will forgive me for not liking this book. My eyes rolled so many times on every page, I was beginning to feel like that girl from The Exorcist. However, I couldn't put it down. Not because it was suspenseful or I wanted to know what was going to happen, but because it was so fascinatingly appalling, I just had to see it through. The writing seemed to me sloppy and witless and not particularly insightful or well observed (I guess powers of observation must be quite limited when you are gazing at your navel with such focussed concentration). But the book did give me something very useful. It actually gave me a meditation mantra. Readers, do not panic. I have not yet gone out of my spirituality-hating wits. But all of us, and particularly those of us for whom life is a catastrophe waiting to happen, can sometimes benefit from a little peace of mind. I have tried a couple of mantras here and there, mainly to lull myself to sleep, and the one the writer shares in this book is the only one that actually seems to work. So for that, I'm grateful to her.
If you must know, I am also learning Tai Chi. Soon I will be dispensing wisdom from a cave in a mountain.
For the time being, however, I am as grounded as possible, wishing my unwelcome squatter a hasty departure.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Lipton Soup - Review of a book I would not touch with a ten foot pole
What can possibly be worse than James Lipton on TV?
James Lipton in a book.
Can you imagine all that pompous fawning and brown-nosing on the printed page? The moist-eyed gushing, the slimy frisson he gets every time he pronounces "bouillion de culture" and "apostrophe"? GAWD.
The horror.
James Lipton in a book.
Can you imagine all that pompous fawning and brown-nosing on the printed page? The moist-eyed gushing, the slimy frisson he gets every time he pronounces "bouillion de culture" and "apostrophe"? GAWD.
The horror.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Amnesia
Oliver Sacks writes an amazing article in this week's New Yorker about a man with the most severe case of amnesia ever recorded, who nevertheless never forgot how to play and conduct music.
I have always wondered why amnesiacs forget everything but can speak and walk and do most mechanical functions. Well, Dr. Sacks explains it beautifully, as always. I will not attempt to explain it back to you and completely maul the text and the science of it. But in a nutshell, we have different kinds of memories and their centers are located in different parts of the brain. Memories of the past are different from the memory that allows us to learn how to perform tasks, so that you could be an amnesiac like Guy Pearce in Memento and still be able to talk, walk and write or drive a car.
But without memory of the immediate past, you have no life. If you have no memory of the immediate past, everything happens for the first time every second, kind of like Groundhog Day, but much more nightmarish and scary. You live in a dark limbo of non being. I'm still trying to understand the implications of the different kinds of memories and how they work together, for I sense that this subject is deeply metaphysical, not only scientific. It's about how memory is identity and how having a past means having a life, and it is about the nature of time and of emotion. Stuff that requires lots of brainwork.
Sacks also talks about how we remember music, which he explains, we not actually remember it, but we relive it every time we hear a melody again.
The fact that this man was able to lift himself (temporarily) out of the darkness of a life without memory through music and through love is something enormous. I just hope they don't make the Hollywood weepie about the triumph of love with Reese Witherspoon as the wife.
It's tempting to give it a stab, though.
Please read the article. It is astounding.
I have always wondered why amnesiacs forget everything but can speak and walk and do most mechanical functions. Well, Dr. Sacks explains it beautifully, as always. I will not attempt to explain it back to you and completely maul the text and the science of it. But in a nutshell, we have different kinds of memories and their centers are located in different parts of the brain. Memories of the past are different from the memory that allows us to learn how to perform tasks, so that you could be an amnesiac like Guy Pearce in Memento and still be able to talk, walk and write or drive a car.
But without memory of the immediate past, you have no life. If you have no memory of the immediate past, everything happens for the first time every second, kind of like Groundhog Day, but much more nightmarish and scary. You live in a dark limbo of non being. I'm still trying to understand the implications of the different kinds of memories and how they work together, for I sense that this subject is deeply metaphysical, not only scientific. It's about how memory is identity and how having a past means having a life, and it is about the nature of time and of emotion. Stuff that requires lots of brainwork.
Sacks also talks about how we remember music, which he explains, we not actually remember it, but we relive it every time we hear a melody again.
The fact that this man was able to lift himself (temporarily) out of the darkness of a life without memory through music and through love is something enormous. I just hope they don't make the Hollywood weepie about the triumph of love with Reese Witherspoon as the wife.
It's tempting to give it a stab, though.
Please read the article. It is astounding.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Suite Française
I did some reading on this trip. The most disturbing was Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, an unfinished novel by a very successful novelist that was murdered by the Nazis in occupied France.
Suite Française is a very disturbing book. Not because it's that great, but because of the circumstances in which it was written. Irene Nemirovsky was a wealthy Jewish Russian exile, whose family of bankers lost everything during the Russian Revolution. She emigrated to France and became quite famous as a novelist.
Suite Française narrates events during the Nazi occupation of France. More precisely, it describes how the French reacted. Nemirovsky has a real jaundiced eye for the French bourgeoisie; in fact, for pretty much everybody. Only someone who really knows wealth and the wealthy can write about them with such contempt. After a while, her contempt stops being interesting and just feels cruel and haughty, with characters so vain and mean spirited, they are almost caricatures. Flaubert skewers provincial life in Madame Bovary and he is poisonous, but somehow not contemptuous of his characters. I guess that's part of his genius. Nemirovsky, on the other hand, seems to loathe everyone, and those characters she doesn't loathe are not as interesting to her. To be fair, she did not finish the novel and it is possible to extrapolate from her copious notes that she intended to balance that out. Parts of the novel are very well written, with merciless clarity and power. But others seem like a Harlequin romance.
I came to this novel from friends' recommendations and because it was being marketed as the last work of a talented writer who lost her life to the Nazis. I think it was even in Oprah's book club. So from what I've heard, here I am, thinking I'm reading the work of an adult Anne Frank. But something in the novel is very strange and disquieting. After a while, one wonders why there is no mention anywhere of a single Jew. There seems to be a stubborn avoidance to this aspect of the story, which is very flummoxing, to say the least. After all, this is a novel about the Nazi occupation of France. These Nazi guys, first thing they did everywhere they went was let everybody know that the Jews were to be ostracized and humiliated. But not a word from her on the subject.
One gives her the benefit of the doubt because this kind of omission can be a perfectly valid and even powerful artistic choice. As in the case of the great German movie Downfall, you can emphatically communicate the bestial evil of the Nazis without showing a single Jew, the point being that Hitler destroyed the Germans as well as everybody else. But that is not the case in Suite Française. The book is an indictment of the French and their petty ways come occupation time. Most of the characters are greedy, prejudiced, cowardly, etc. I've read accounts of life in wartime and that seems to be the human modus operandi, so no surprise there, except for the unabashed vitriol. But then there is a huge chapter devoted to the impossible romance between a married Frenchwoman and a dashingly handsome, noble and cultivated Nazi officer, who plays the piano and loves her deeply. The whole thing reads like a bodice ripper or a bucolic pastoral scene but with Nazis carousing among the sheep and the peasants. For obvious reasons, the novel ends abruptly. It left an acrid taste in my mouth. Why the avoidance of the Jews? Why the infatuation with the Nazis? (It's not that she loves them, but she seems to have more compassion for them than for the French). Well, I didn't know the half of it.
At the end of the novel there are two fascinating appendixes. One is composed of Nemirovsky's notes on her work in progress. They shed some light into her process, but far more light into how selfconscious she was about her own work. I think there is a reason why personal jottings by writers should not be made available to the public, for the most part. They are not that enlightening, at least in her case, and they show too much of the writer's ego, which is tiresome. At one point she says something like "describe the houses of the wealthy to the readers. The masses love that".
The second appendix makes for truly harrowing reading, for it is composed of the frantic letters her husband wrote to everybody he thought could help save her when she was arrested by the Nazis. After all, she was a very successful novelist. Two of her books had been adapted into movies. More importantly, she had converted to Catholicism. She hated the communists, for they had destroyed her family. And a number of other fascinating details (she hated her mother, a hateful, vain woman and she hated, according to the editor, "her Jewish family).
It turns out that Irene Nemirovsky had deep conflicts about her Judaism. The editor writes she had her family converted to Catholicism because of fear (some Jewish artists, like her and Gustav Mahler in his time, did anything they could to be taken seriously and, because they suffered the poison of antisemitism, they thought that by renouncing their Judaism publicly they would help their work. They were wrong. Those who hated them for being Jewish continued doing so after their conversion). Not only that, but Nemirovsky had published some of her work in an antisemitic magazine, a fact her desperate husband, a man called Michel Epstein, pointed out to the collaborationist authorities in order to save her. His letters are frantic (I paraphrase): yes, we're from Jewish descent, but we both hate Bolsheviks, and you can see in my wife's work no evidence of any sympathy for the Jews. YIKES. He writes to everybody who is anybody in France, counts, editors, Marechal Petain himself, all those eminent Christians that he knows from his privileged life. At one point, after having exhausted all his important connections to no avail, the husband gets a letter from a woman who works in the Red Cross. She says to him: the only people who may know anything about your wife are the Jewish Union. You should be talking to them. This, to me is revelatory and bloodcurling, and in a way evidence that the Jewish self-loathing this couple felt was much deeper than a mere conversion meant to save their lives.
Some people, like her editors, helped immensely, and even they were tactfully alarmed by the betraying tone of the most desperate letters. The Count Whatever never answers, which is somehow expected, and in the end Petain himself has Epstein arrested and sent to Auschwitz as well, for all his trouble. Both of them died there. Then the French police, as they have nothing better to do, search all over France for the two young daughters of the couple, ages 9 and 5, to send them to their deaths as well. Their babysitter, a truly righteous woman, hid them through the war and saved them with the help of Nemirovsky's editors. The manuscripts happened to survive because the older girl took them with her in her valise. This is far more interesting reading than the novel and it would make an incredible movie, as would the novel itself, but I wonder if the French are ready to examine so brutally the fact of their collaboration. There are plenty of movies about the heroic French resistance, to my knowledge, but I don't know of any that confront the phenomenon of collaboration directly. Feel free to disabuse me if I'm wrong.
So what I want to know is, are readers of Suite Française understanding that this woman had deep reserves of Jewish self-loathing and are they reading the novel in this context? Or is it just an adventurous romp in the woods while the Fritzes are in town?
But I am obsessed. I cannot stop thinking what this poor snobbish woman must have felt as she was stripped of all human dignity and led to a horrible death because of the Jewish origins she took such pains to deny. No amount of fame, of talent, of swearing on the holy cross would have helped and it didn't.
Suite Française is a very disturbing book. Not because it's that great, but because of the circumstances in which it was written. Irene Nemirovsky was a wealthy Jewish Russian exile, whose family of bankers lost everything during the Russian Revolution. She emigrated to France and became quite famous as a novelist.
Suite Française narrates events during the Nazi occupation of France. More precisely, it describes how the French reacted. Nemirovsky has a real jaundiced eye for the French bourgeoisie; in fact, for pretty much everybody. Only someone who really knows wealth and the wealthy can write about them with such contempt. After a while, her contempt stops being interesting and just feels cruel and haughty, with characters so vain and mean spirited, they are almost caricatures. Flaubert skewers provincial life in Madame Bovary and he is poisonous, but somehow not contemptuous of his characters. I guess that's part of his genius. Nemirovsky, on the other hand, seems to loathe everyone, and those characters she doesn't loathe are not as interesting to her. To be fair, she did not finish the novel and it is possible to extrapolate from her copious notes that she intended to balance that out. Parts of the novel are very well written, with merciless clarity and power. But others seem like a Harlequin romance.
I came to this novel from friends' recommendations and because it was being marketed as the last work of a talented writer who lost her life to the Nazis. I think it was even in Oprah's book club. So from what I've heard, here I am, thinking I'm reading the work of an adult Anne Frank. But something in the novel is very strange and disquieting. After a while, one wonders why there is no mention anywhere of a single Jew. There seems to be a stubborn avoidance to this aspect of the story, which is very flummoxing, to say the least. After all, this is a novel about the Nazi occupation of France. These Nazi guys, first thing they did everywhere they went was let everybody know that the Jews were to be ostracized and humiliated. But not a word from her on the subject.
One gives her the benefit of the doubt because this kind of omission can be a perfectly valid and even powerful artistic choice. As in the case of the great German movie Downfall, you can emphatically communicate the bestial evil of the Nazis without showing a single Jew, the point being that Hitler destroyed the Germans as well as everybody else. But that is not the case in Suite Française. The book is an indictment of the French and their petty ways come occupation time. Most of the characters are greedy, prejudiced, cowardly, etc. I've read accounts of life in wartime and that seems to be the human modus operandi, so no surprise there, except for the unabashed vitriol. But then there is a huge chapter devoted to the impossible romance between a married Frenchwoman and a dashingly handsome, noble and cultivated Nazi officer, who plays the piano and loves her deeply. The whole thing reads like a bodice ripper or a bucolic pastoral scene but with Nazis carousing among the sheep and the peasants. For obvious reasons, the novel ends abruptly. It left an acrid taste in my mouth. Why the avoidance of the Jews? Why the infatuation with the Nazis? (It's not that she loves them, but she seems to have more compassion for them than for the French). Well, I didn't know the half of it.
At the end of the novel there are two fascinating appendixes. One is composed of Nemirovsky's notes on her work in progress. They shed some light into her process, but far more light into how selfconscious she was about her own work. I think there is a reason why personal jottings by writers should not be made available to the public, for the most part. They are not that enlightening, at least in her case, and they show too much of the writer's ego, which is tiresome. At one point she says something like "describe the houses of the wealthy to the readers. The masses love that".
The second appendix makes for truly harrowing reading, for it is composed of the frantic letters her husband wrote to everybody he thought could help save her when she was arrested by the Nazis. After all, she was a very successful novelist. Two of her books had been adapted into movies. More importantly, she had converted to Catholicism. She hated the communists, for they had destroyed her family. And a number of other fascinating details (she hated her mother, a hateful, vain woman and she hated, according to the editor, "her Jewish family).
It turns out that Irene Nemirovsky had deep conflicts about her Judaism. The editor writes she had her family converted to Catholicism because of fear (some Jewish artists, like her and Gustav Mahler in his time, did anything they could to be taken seriously and, because they suffered the poison of antisemitism, they thought that by renouncing their Judaism publicly they would help their work. They were wrong. Those who hated them for being Jewish continued doing so after their conversion). Not only that, but Nemirovsky had published some of her work in an antisemitic magazine, a fact her desperate husband, a man called Michel Epstein, pointed out to the collaborationist authorities in order to save her. His letters are frantic (I paraphrase): yes, we're from Jewish descent, but we both hate Bolsheviks, and you can see in my wife's work no evidence of any sympathy for the Jews. YIKES. He writes to everybody who is anybody in France, counts, editors, Marechal Petain himself, all those eminent Christians that he knows from his privileged life. At one point, after having exhausted all his important connections to no avail, the husband gets a letter from a woman who works in the Red Cross. She says to him: the only people who may know anything about your wife are the Jewish Union. You should be talking to them. This, to me is revelatory and bloodcurling, and in a way evidence that the Jewish self-loathing this couple felt was much deeper than a mere conversion meant to save their lives.
Some people, like her editors, helped immensely, and even they were tactfully alarmed by the betraying tone of the most desperate letters. The Count Whatever never answers, which is somehow expected, and in the end Petain himself has Epstein arrested and sent to Auschwitz as well, for all his trouble. Both of them died there. Then the French police, as they have nothing better to do, search all over France for the two young daughters of the couple, ages 9 and 5, to send them to their deaths as well. Their babysitter, a truly righteous woman, hid them through the war and saved them with the help of Nemirovsky's editors. The manuscripts happened to survive because the older girl took them with her in her valise. This is far more interesting reading than the novel and it would make an incredible movie, as would the novel itself, but I wonder if the French are ready to examine so brutally the fact of their collaboration. There are plenty of movies about the heroic French resistance, to my knowledge, but I don't know of any that confront the phenomenon of collaboration directly. Feel free to disabuse me if I'm wrong.
So what I want to know is, are readers of Suite Française understanding that this woman had deep reserves of Jewish self-loathing and are they reading the novel in this context? Or is it just an adventurous romp in the woods while the Fritzes are in town?
But I am obsessed. I cannot stop thinking what this poor snobbish woman must have felt as she was stripped of all human dignity and led to a horrible death because of the Jewish origins she took such pains to deny. No amount of fame, of talent, of swearing on the holy cross would have helped and it didn't.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Back to Obscurity
Since I haven't mentioned Paris Hilton, this modest page is back to its loyal six readers.
The pressure of such a meteoric rise to fame was becoming unbearable, I have to confess. The pressure of appealing to people in Estonia and Australia and my darling one reader in South Africa (hola Creon!) was starting to affect me. I guess I didn't help matters talking about subjects as dear to my heart as Janet Maslin and Hamas. But I only got myself to blame. I'm sure my opinion in these matters is probably unpopular. However, I could care less.
So it is a relief that the blinding spotlight of internet popularity is off this site again. Unless I mention Fushe Kruje, who knows, that may do the trick.
The pressure of such a meteoric rise to fame was becoming unbearable, I have to confess. The pressure of appealing to people in Estonia and Australia and my darling one reader in South Africa (hola Creon!) was starting to affect me. I guess I didn't help matters talking about subjects as dear to my heart as Janet Maslin and Hamas. But I only got myself to blame. I'm sure my opinion in these matters is probably unpopular. However, I could care less.
So it is a relief that the blinding spotlight of internet popularity is off this site again. Unless I mention Fushe Kruje, who knows, that may do the trick.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
International Commotion
I wake up today to check out my stats of this here blog and I see a huge, totally unexplained spike in readership (meaning from like 6 to like 60). I thought it was my comment about the end of The Sopranos but after some detective work I soon found out that this only matters here in the US. The rest of the world doesn't give a crap about a crummy TV show, which is how it should be.
Apparently, what got me lots of readers was the post about Bush being adored in Albania.
It seems some people in Australia, Finland, Estonia and Sweden (hi guys!) found it interesting.
I even got a very offended comment from an actual Albanian. She has a right to be miffed, although she seemed more offended about what she read in somebody else's blog than in mine.
Who knew people take geopolitics so seriously?
Apparently, what got me lots of readers was the post about Bush being adored in Albania.
It seems some people in Australia, Finland, Estonia and Sweden (hi guys!) found it interesting.
I even got a very offended comment from an actual Albanian. She has a right to be miffed, although she seemed more offended about what she read in somebody else's blog than in mine.
Who knew people take geopolitics so seriously?
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Reading List
All of a sudden, I'm awash with books. For as long as I was working full time in advertising, it was hard for me to concentrate on a book. I was hardly reading. Now that my time belongs to me, I read more. I think the culprit is Swann's Way by Marcel Proust. It took me so long to finish that book that when I was done I wanted to rush out and start something different asap. Merci, Marcel.
So this is what I have on my stack these days, dear readers, and feel free to recommend or opine on any glaring omissions or lapses of judgement to your taste.
• The Essential Kabbalah. Nothing to do with red thread bracelets, Esther-Madonna or mystical bottled water, this slim volume is a distillation of some of the key passages in the actual sources of Kabbalistic books (mostly all composed around the 12th Century in France and Germany). The writing is mysterious, but there are useful notes and the meditative, philosophical musings, make total sense (and work wonders before going to bed). I don't bring this book into the bathroom.
• Amuleto by Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño is hots right now, and with good reason. I saw the English translation of this slim volume (always into slim volumes, me). My method worked. I opened the book, read the first sentence, it totally grabbed me and I asked Little Enchiladita (who was coming to town) to bring me the original in Spanish from DF. It is a beautiful novel about an actual character I remember from my days as a university student in Mexico City. A woman, whose real name was Alcira, an illegal Uruguayan alien who survived the Army's taking of the National University campus in 1968 by staying for ten days in the bathroom of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, as we call the Humanities in Mexico. If you saw the bathrooms, you'd be impressed by her heroic feat of resistance. I remember Alcira (in the novel her name is Aurora) hanging around the campus, an old, loony lady without teeth, a poetic, raving mad, lefty dreamer from the sixties. By the time I was there, in 1981, the university's authorities let her wander around, vociferate in the hallways, sometimes interrupt classes. She was a living myth and she was untouchable. As someone generously describes her in the book, a female version of Don Quixote. Bolaño's book is a loving recollection of her and her times. As is usual with him, he doesn't go for the obvious, the telling of the ordeal. He goes into her mind, her feverish recollections, her memory and her visions and you can tell that his love of poetry sustains not only his language, but how he tells the story, in a gorgeous, unforced stream of consciousness. I can't think of any other novelist who gets the Mexico City bohemian culture, its crazy, violent nights, as wisely and sharply as Bolaño. Perhaps because he is an outsider, he is extraordinarily clear-eyed. He is brutal but sympathetic. A great writer. I want to read his big novel about the Savage Detectives but in the original Spanish.
• Very Good, Jeeves! by P.G. Wodehouse. Very funny, but a little at a time goes a long way.
• The Virgin's Guide to Mexico City by my friend Eric Martin. So far, I really like Eric's powers of observation and his sense of humor. And I recognize certain characters and situations, from when we coincided in Mexico City, which is neat-o.
Awaiting consumption (please chime in if you've read any of these)
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe (necessary Summer trashy reading, ok?)
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky (for my impending trip to Paris)
The Spider's Web by Joseph Roth (a fantastic German-Jewish writer. Love him)
We Wish To Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Phillip Gourevitch. It's taken me years to muster the courage to read this book about Rwanda.
So this is what I have on my stack these days, dear readers, and feel free to recommend or opine on any glaring omissions or lapses of judgement to your taste.
• The Essential Kabbalah. Nothing to do with red thread bracelets, Esther-Madonna or mystical bottled water, this slim volume is a distillation of some of the key passages in the actual sources of Kabbalistic books (mostly all composed around the 12th Century in France and Germany). The writing is mysterious, but there are useful notes and the meditative, philosophical musings, make total sense (and work wonders before going to bed). I don't bring this book into the bathroom.
• Amuleto by Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño is hots right now, and with good reason. I saw the English translation of this slim volume (always into slim volumes, me). My method worked. I opened the book, read the first sentence, it totally grabbed me and I asked Little Enchiladita (who was coming to town) to bring me the original in Spanish from DF. It is a beautiful novel about an actual character I remember from my days as a university student in Mexico City. A woman, whose real name was Alcira, an illegal Uruguayan alien who survived the Army's taking of the National University campus in 1968 by staying for ten days in the bathroom of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, as we call the Humanities in Mexico. If you saw the bathrooms, you'd be impressed by her heroic feat of resistance. I remember Alcira (in the novel her name is Aurora) hanging around the campus, an old, loony lady without teeth, a poetic, raving mad, lefty dreamer from the sixties. By the time I was there, in 1981, the university's authorities let her wander around, vociferate in the hallways, sometimes interrupt classes. She was a living myth and she was untouchable. As someone generously describes her in the book, a female version of Don Quixote. Bolaño's book is a loving recollection of her and her times. As is usual with him, he doesn't go for the obvious, the telling of the ordeal. He goes into her mind, her feverish recollections, her memory and her visions and you can tell that his love of poetry sustains not only his language, but how he tells the story, in a gorgeous, unforced stream of consciousness. I can't think of any other novelist who gets the Mexico City bohemian culture, its crazy, violent nights, as wisely and sharply as Bolaño. Perhaps because he is an outsider, he is extraordinarily clear-eyed. He is brutal but sympathetic. A great writer. I want to read his big novel about the Savage Detectives but in the original Spanish.
• Very Good, Jeeves! by P.G. Wodehouse. Very funny, but a little at a time goes a long way.
• The Virgin's Guide to Mexico City by my friend Eric Martin. So far, I really like Eric's powers of observation and his sense of humor. And I recognize certain characters and situations, from when we coincided in Mexico City, which is neat-o.
Awaiting consumption (please chime in if you've read any of these)
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe (necessary Summer trashy reading, ok?)
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky (for my impending trip to Paris)
The Spider's Web by Joseph Roth (a fantastic German-Jewish writer. Love him)
We Wish To Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Phillip Gourevitch. It's taken me years to muster the courage to read this book about Rwanda.
Monday, June 04, 2007
I'm reading Bertie Wooster
So his creator, P.G. Wodehouse rather liked the Nazis. Well, is that a reason not to investigate one of the funniest writers in the English language? Not quite. Once in a while I go to the venerable Strand (now with air conditioning!) and I buy $5 books. It feels wonderful. So I bought Very Good, Jeeves, a collection of short stories. I have a method for buying books. I open the book on the first page and read the first paragraph. If it grabs me, I buy it. It seems to work quite well. Alas, it works on very few books. Frankly, most of the books I open strike me as trying too hard to be cute and postmodern, at least the ones that are regularly extolled in the New York Times, and whose young, hip authors almost always happen to live in Brooklyn and give good headshots.
Well, Bertie Wooster's inimitable voice will grab you from the get go. Even though they are trifles, I have been laughing out loud at some of the magnificently hilarious language of the book. Delightful. I love that all these brainless rich people are always asking Jeeves to deliver them from their silly predicaments. He does it with grace and a minute amount of elegant willfulness, which is lovely. I know you know that, but I didn't until Saturday. So it is news to me.
Well, Bertie Wooster's inimitable voice will grab you from the get go. Even though they are trifles, I have been laughing out loud at some of the magnificently hilarious language of the book. Delightful. I love that all these brainless rich people are always asking Jeeves to deliver them from their silly predicaments. He does it with grace and a minute amount of elegant willfulness, which is lovely. I know you know that, but I didn't until Saturday. So it is news to me.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Review of a book that I haven't read
Here is a very interesting excerpt of God is Not Great by polemicist Christopher Hitchens.
I have noticed that there are several books that defend atheism lately. This is obviously connected to the fact that religion nowadays has become not only monstrously perverted in some cases, but in most cases hugely irrelevant to human reality. However, I think that being an atheist and hating religion can be two separate things, though they are not easy to detach from one another.
The first one concerns a simple question: is there a God? Frankly, at this point I think we can all agree that nobody knows for sure. Faith is no proof of anything.
I am reading a book called The Essential Kabbalah, which is a collection of actual kabbalistic sources and has nothing to do with Madonna or red thread bracelets. The way the Kabbalists depict God and his emanations, sounds remarkably similar to the theory of the Big Bang and the Black Holes.
The Kabbalists say that God is better described by what it isn't, than by what it is. It is not a man, nor a woman, nor a human, nor anything. It is anywhere and everywhere. It is total absence and total presence, and too complex for us to grasp or describe. They describe how at one point its immense darkness exploded into an emanation, in a way that sounds very similar to the theories of the beginning of the universe by modern scientists. This makes sense to me. In their philosophical and mystical wanderings, the kabbalists tried to explain the nature of the universe, just as physicists do but without the math.
To me, this means that perhaps God is Nature. God is Creation itself, in all its complexity and paradox. I think this is what science says that God is. So we come full circle and everybody lives happily ever after. This I can buy. The angry God with antropomorphic tantrums, petty grievances, authoritarian pronouncements, total apathy to human suffering and terrible manners, no dice.
Now, apparently Hitchens berates all the world's religions. This is where he and I differ (and in the Iraq war, and in thinking that women are not funny). Certain parts of religion have been civilizing forces. The concept of the Sabbath, or the Ten Commandments, for instance. But obviously these are man made laws and have little or nothing to do with God. People who think the Bible is divinely written can think whatever they want, but it is like lunatics enforcing their loony beliefs on the sane part of the population. It's as if we were all forced to lead our lives by the daily horoscope. Can't be done. And for all his protestations about art and literature, I think it is safe to say that without the Bible or the Greek religious myths there would be no Shakespeare, no Cervantes, no Western art or literature, no nada. So let's give credit where it is due. Hitchens says atheists hate ritual. He should speak for himself. Ritual can be magnificent and nurturing to the soul, even the soul of an atheist.
It is unfair and reductive to compare Moses' puny burning bush to what you can see through the Hubble telescope, or to the DNA ladder, like Hitchens does. The Bible is a stunning work of literature and a pretty amazing law tract, among other things. And in contrast to pure science, it offers psychological insight into the human condition.
So we cannot say everything about religion is evil. What we can say is that religion, because of its absolute pieties and its zealous, simplistic grip on morality, is very easy to abuse. Like political power. When abused (most of the time), religion simply becomes superstition and snake oil marketing, which clerics use to further their power and influence in the world. The worst abuse of power can come from clerics from every persuasion everywhere who exploit the blind faith of other mortals. I have seen this with my own eyes: people think that a cleric has some special communication channel with God and even perhaps some whiff of infallibility or sainthood because of his proximity to God. Armed with this arrogant knowledge, the cleric then spins these poor, gullible innocents like a top.
I don't need to get into the kinds of unfathomable evil this has unleashed in the world. From inquisitions and pogroms and ethnic cleansing and civil wars, and endless murder and persecution, to the molesting of young children with impunity, and the enforced ignorance of the impoverished masses. Marx was being polite, I tell you. The poison of the people is more like it.
Of course, there are clerics here and there who are truly decent and pious and who became clerics in order to do good. They can probably be counted with the fingers of two hands and the toes of two feet.
It's the people who appropriate and institutionalize and misinterpret the sources of religion that deserve hanging.
I have noticed that there are several books that defend atheism lately. This is obviously connected to the fact that religion nowadays has become not only monstrously perverted in some cases, but in most cases hugely irrelevant to human reality. However, I think that being an atheist and hating religion can be two separate things, though they are not easy to detach from one another.
The first one concerns a simple question: is there a God? Frankly, at this point I think we can all agree that nobody knows for sure. Faith is no proof of anything.
I am reading a book called The Essential Kabbalah, which is a collection of actual kabbalistic sources and has nothing to do with Madonna or red thread bracelets. The way the Kabbalists depict God and his emanations, sounds remarkably similar to the theory of the Big Bang and the Black Holes.
The Kabbalists say that God is better described by what it isn't, than by what it is. It is not a man, nor a woman, nor a human, nor anything. It is anywhere and everywhere. It is total absence and total presence, and too complex for us to grasp or describe. They describe how at one point its immense darkness exploded into an emanation, in a way that sounds very similar to the theories of the beginning of the universe by modern scientists. This makes sense to me. In their philosophical and mystical wanderings, the kabbalists tried to explain the nature of the universe, just as physicists do but without the math.
To me, this means that perhaps God is Nature. God is Creation itself, in all its complexity and paradox. I think this is what science says that God is. So we come full circle and everybody lives happily ever after. This I can buy. The angry God with antropomorphic tantrums, petty grievances, authoritarian pronouncements, total apathy to human suffering and terrible manners, no dice.
Now, apparently Hitchens berates all the world's religions. This is where he and I differ (and in the Iraq war, and in thinking that women are not funny). Certain parts of religion have been civilizing forces. The concept of the Sabbath, or the Ten Commandments, for instance. But obviously these are man made laws and have little or nothing to do with God. People who think the Bible is divinely written can think whatever they want, but it is like lunatics enforcing their loony beliefs on the sane part of the population. It's as if we were all forced to lead our lives by the daily horoscope. Can't be done. And for all his protestations about art and literature, I think it is safe to say that without the Bible or the Greek religious myths there would be no Shakespeare, no Cervantes, no Western art or literature, no nada. So let's give credit where it is due. Hitchens says atheists hate ritual. He should speak for himself. Ritual can be magnificent and nurturing to the soul, even the soul of an atheist.
It is unfair and reductive to compare Moses' puny burning bush to what you can see through the Hubble telescope, or to the DNA ladder, like Hitchens does. The Bible is a stunning work of literature and a pretty amazing law tract, among other things. And in contrast to pure science, it offers psychological insight into the human condition.
So we cannot say everything about religion is evil. What we can say is that religion, because of its absolute pieties and its zealous, simplistic grip on morality, is very easy to abuse. Like political power. When abused (most of the time), religion simply becomes superstition and snake oil marketing, which clerics use to further their power and influence in the world. The worst abuse of power can come from clerics from every persuasion everywhere who exploit the blind faith of other mortals. I have seen this with my own eyes: people think that a cleric has some special communication channel with God and even perhaps some whiff of infallibility or sainthood because of his proximity to God. Armed with this arrogant knowledge, the cleric then spins these poor, gullible innocents like a top.
I don't need to get into the kinds of unfathomable evil this has unleashed in the world. From inquisitions and pogroms and ethnic cleansing and civil wars, and endless murder and persecution, to the molesting of young children with impunity, and the enforced ignorance of the impoverished masses. Marx was being polite, I tell you. The poison of the people is more like it.
Of course, there are clerics here and there who are truly decent and pious and who became clerics in order to do good. They can probably be counted with the fingers of two hands and the toes of two feet.
It's the people who appropriate and institutionalize and misinterpret the sources of religion that deserve hanging.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Latin Literary Rock Stars
Yesterday, another panel of the PEN international writers festival, this time with 4 young writers from Latin America. The panel was called "Gritty Realism", as opposed to "Magical Realism", something that at this point we are all exhausted of. We want to get off the literary merry-go-round that seems to imply that anything ever written in Spanish has flying grandmothers and people who eat butterflies. So now we have writers who write about the world that surrounds them: a world in which the absurd is a daily occurrence, but as Jorge Franco (Rosario Tijeras), from Colombia, said, reality in our countries is exaggerated enough, the writer doesn't need to embellish.
Just for clarification, the greatest, and to my mind the only worthy example of magical realism is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and he has always been far more soundly on the side of the real than on the side of the magical. This is something his countless cheap imitators have never been able to grasp. So they come up with people who fly or eat mole with rose petals or see crabs in the sky for no reason.
Guillermo Arriaga, from Mexico, was there. He has written screenplays (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel) and novels. Although his movies are highly melodramatic, he counts himself on the side of reality and action. A very charismatic guy, with a big personality. Rather macho.
Daniel Alarcón, a very young US writer who grew up in Peru, impressed me with his coherent, intelligent and terse comments and his refreshing lack of ego. I bought his novel, Lost City Radio, because he seems so smart.
One interesting thing of seeing panels of writers is that the transparency of the writer's ego is intense in person. Writers are a needy bunch and very few of them know how to be truly self-effacing.
Thus, Patricia Melo, a writer from Brazil, for some inexplicable reason, decided to give a lengthy prepared lecture on the source material for her novels, seemingly impervious to the fact that there were other three writers with things to say and that this was supposed to be a plural conversation.
Had invaluable pearls of wisdom come out of her, it was still completely inappropriate and sadly counterproductive. Instead of coming across as an interesting writer, she seemed full of herself. Poor Francisco Goldman, the moderator, didn't know whether to interrupt, which would have been dramatic, but called for. Luckily, after the hostages were freed, the conversation was able to begin. It was interesting but labored. It didn't flow easily. I don't know if this is because in Latin America everything is always very formal, or because this woman effectively killed the mood and the tempo. Also, and this is not the first time, the translator provided for Jorge Franco was a disaster. She interrupted him every second word, and added freely of herself, with a touch of hysteria. He was frustrated, but by Jove, all of us Latin Americans are very well brought up people: he suffered her with great dignity. Still, Jorge Franco, Daniel Alarcón and Arriaga were relatively spontaneous and natural in their responses.
Alarcón told a wonderful anecdote about Peru, that pretty much sums up the tenor of life south of the border:
Apparently the government of Lima decided to enforce a seatbelt law. Peruvians were bitterly unhappy about having to wear seatbelts. So some enterprising guy sold t-shirts that had a black diagonal band printed across the chest. You could wear this t-shirt to protest the seatbelt law, and even better, you could wear it to fool the cops.
And that in a nutshell is Latin America for you.
Just for clarification, the greatest, and to my mind the only worthy example of magical realism is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and he has always been far more soundly on the side of the real than on the side of the magical. This is something his countless cheap imitators have never been able to grasp. So they come up with people who fly or eat mole with rose petals or see crabs in the sky for no reason.
Guillermo Arriaga, from Mexico, was there. He has written screenplays (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel) and novels. Although his movies are highly melodramatic, he counts himself on the side of reality and action. A very charismatic guy, with a big personality. Rather macho.
Daniel Alarcón, a very young US writer who grew up in Peru, impressed me with his coherent, intelligent and terse comments and his refreshing lack of ego. I bought his novel, Lost City Radio, because he seems so smart.
One interesting thing of seeing panels of writers is that the transparency of the writer's ego is intense in person. Writers are a needy bunch and very few of them know how to be truly self-effacing.
Thus, Patricia Melo, a writer from Brazil, for some inexplicable reason, decided to give a lengthy prepared lecture on the source material for her novels, seemingly impervious to the fact that there were other three writers with things to say and that this was supposed to be a plural conversation.
Had invaluable pearls of wisdom come out of her, it was still completely inappropriate and sadly counterproductive. Instead of coming across as an interesting writer, she seemed full of herself. Poor Francisco Goldman, the moderator, didn't know whether to interrupt, which would have been dramatic, but called for. Luckily, after the hostages were freed, the conversation was able to begin. It was interesting but labored. It didn't flow easily. I don't know if this is because in Latin America everything is always very formal, or because this woman effectively killed the mood and the tempo. Also, and this is not the first time, the translator provided for Jorge Franco was a disaster. She interrupted him every second word, and added freely of herself, with a touch of hysteria. He was frustrated, but by Jove, all of us Latin Americans are very well brought up people: he suffered her with great dignity. Still, Jorge Franco, Daniel Alarcón and Arriaga were relatively spontaneous and natural in their responses.
Alarcón told a wonderful anecdote about Peru, that pretty much sums up the tenor of life south of the border:
Apparently the government of Lima decided to enforce a seatbelt law. Peruvians were bitterly unhappy about having to wear seatbelts. So some enterprising guy sold t-shirts that had a black diagonal band printed across the chest. You could wear this t-shirt to protest the seatbelt law, and even better, you could wear it to fool the cops.
And that in a nutshell is Latin America for you.
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