Recovery Slow Along the Border

A tornado hit Piedras Negras, Coahuila and Eagle Pass, Texas last week. The devastation is intense and little help is coming from either government. This detail from an article in the Houston Chronicle:

Thursday afternoon, an elderly woman stopped in a parking lot where someone had spilled a bag of dried beans.

She stooped and retrieved each one from the gravel, placing them on a paper plate.

Read the whole article here. Not sure how to help, but if anyone has any ideas, email me.

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Mysterious New Orleans

An intense and powerful poem on the Writers in the Schools blog today by a 6th grader in Houston named Destiny who is a survivor of Katrina from New Orleans.

It happened all of a sudden like my life was ending in front of me.
Water rushing through the door like surfing on a beach.
Climbing in the attic like dogs starving for food.

Read the rest of the poem here. As I've worked with kids for years, I have some small idea of how challenging the job can be. But a poem like this makes all the effort worthwhile.

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I am officially a Master.

Well almost. Todavía faltan varias cosas de la escuela. Como parece que siempre faltan. The magnolia trees look sparse. Leaves escasean en el exterior de las copas. The big blooms are about to emerge sólo para convertirse después en esos granadas peligrosas de la canícula.

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Overwhelming

1) We train men in the U.S. to be violent, to never cry, that anger is the only emotion worthy of expression. Then, we send them abroad to wage war and to kill. We kill more people then I can personally count. And then the media is shocked when the violence comes back home.

2) As a white man, I'm troubled by the violence that my Anglo-American ancestors and contemporaries promote and wage around the world. Violence is a human trait, but it has particular histories, constructions, meanings and valences in different communities. Understanding these differences is crucial.

3) I am not watching television anymore. Last night, I felt sick. A headache, my bones ached, my stomach roiled. Went for a walk on the bayou.

Blogger Daniel Hernandez pulls together a lot of compelling links with discussion from a variety of sources. LA Times reported on violence in the Korean American community in Los Angeles before Monday. Andrew Lam in the New American Media has a column on the desire for it not to be "one of us." And Asian students at Berkeley fight stereotyping.

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All About Translation

Despite my last post, the NY Times ain't all bad. I'm impressed that their Sunday Book Review this week is all about fiction in translation. There is great info gathered on translation, the perilously low numbers of books in translation in the US and other compelling data.

Also, Joel Agee writes this about translation:

I was a writer before I became a translator, and it was the writer in me who taught the translator the exacting discipline of fidelity to the original text,” Agee said by e-mail. “But the translator in turn taught the writer something he didn’t know yet: To write is to translate — not from another language, but from a formless, darkly stirring source where what needs to be said is felt to be potentially or even actually already present. That is how the impossible work begins. Gradually, and sometimes in bursts, the translation into language takes shape, and when it is done, it seems like a miracle.

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NY Times Book Review Editor Pulls a Don Imus

Christine Granados writes una columna bien chingóna about the NY Times Book Review editor's visit to El Paso.

When the guero is finished with his talk, I buy his book so I can ask him what role he thinks Chicano literature is going to play in American letters. And because I asked straight up like that, he couldn't bring up Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who we both know ain't Mexican-American. The pobre had to answer something, and you know what he told me? He just doesn't see it having a big role in literature, such as other media and the Internet.

Read it all here at the EP Times. And I am impressed the El Paso daily has columnists like Granados...y escribiendo con code-switching y todo. Rock on. Y gracias a Emmy por haberlo posteado en su blog.

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Lemebel

Hay que conocerle a Pedro Lemebel, el hippioso, el maricón orgulloso, la diosa proletaria, izquierdista, anarca. En un día como el día triste y fatídico que me toca hoy vivir, me alegra leerlo. Leer de camellos en los Andes, de la lucha diaria, del odio por las fronteras, sus gustos, sus desafíos a lo occidental-hegemónico. Como dice en una entrevista aquí:

Pero yo no creo en la aceptación, es muy cristiana la aceptación. Yo sospecho cuando me aceptan, cuando me comprenden. Como dice Perlongher, yo no quiero que ni me comprendan ni que me entiendan, yo quiero que me cojan, una y otra vez. ¡Bis!

La entrevista está aquí. Lee más de sus crónicas aquí y aquí. El sitio de La Nación en Chile está aquí; puedes teclear "Lemebel" donde dice Búsqueda y allí aparecerán muchas de sus crónicas.

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Boullosa on Bolaño

Carmen Boullosa writes in The Nation about Roberto Bolaño, his novels translated into English, Mexico City in the seventies:

Years later, like the rest of us, Bolaño had to respond to the question: Are you for or against "magic realism"? It bounced back to us from younger generations who hadn't known the privileged, navel-gazing literary world we had enjoyed in the early '70s. With the political and economic tragedies of the region, the literary circles broke and scattered, the publishing houses collapsed and Mexico City stopped being Latin America's sounding board. The youngest took their cues from the gringos--they judged the panorama of Latin American writing by which books had become hits in English translation.

Read it all here.

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(¿)Indispensable o(r) dispensable?

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Sorry y'all...

Studying for my final exams to become a Master.

Pero mientras, pueden echarle un ojo a este artículo de Diana Palaversich que encontré en Literaturas.com. Dice ella:

Alberto Fuguet y los llamados “McOndistas” rechazan ese Macondo pobre y exótico como una imagen falsa de América Latina que se vende al mundo, y en su lugar instalan un McOndo (post)moderno lleno de shopping malls, condominios de lujo, McDonald’s y computadoras Mac...Lo que es necesario criticar no es la creación del país McOndo sino la arrogancia con la cual los antologadores y cuentistas, hijos de clases altas o media altas, presentan su realidad como la única realidad relevante del continente.

Leelo todo aquí.

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