Last night after grading and preparing for classroom workshops I had time to finish Luis Alberto Urrea’s short story collection Six Kinds of Sky. I was unfamiliar with Urrea’s work but I’ve been reading through my list of Latino authors and I have to say there was much to admire. I enjoyed “Mr Mendoza’s Paint Brush” perhaps most out of the collection. Urrea gives a mix of straight story telling and farce and perhaps a bit of the surreal mixing in the story. This seemed to be a constant throughout the stories. I also enjoyed “Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses”–a story about a white guy mourning the loss of his wife. A nice mix of the tragic and the beautiful. I was also intrigued by the final non-fiction essay of the book “Amazing Grace: Story and Writer.” I liked the insight into Urrea’s craft and thought process.

Had some time this weekend to return to Julian Schnabel’s film Before Night Falls. There are several aspects to the film that I admire. I like watching films about young writers and this film was based on Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, a young writer living through interesting times such as the Cuban Revolution. What I also enjoyed was the episodic structure to the film, moving from Arenas’ experience as a young peasant boy, to his openly gay adult life and to his time as a political prisoner inside a Cuban prison.

This trailer hides the fact that Arenas sexuality as a young man is explored fully in the film, maybe more so than the man as a young writer.  I’ve read excerpts from his novel Singing From the Well mentioned in the film and I hope to read the novel he wrote during his two years incarcerated. I also hope to read his autobiography with the same title. The scenes with Johnny Depp stand out with him in a dual role as a Cuban official and also as a cross dressing inmate who smuggles Arenas’ manuscript out of prison. Javier Bardem’s acting also stands out as I’ve read he studied with Arenas’ surviving partner to perfect mannerisms.

I also admired how the film was unapologetically filled with Arenas’ poetry and prose read in Spanish. My favorite scene was when his mentor and editor referred to his type writer as the most important possession he could ever own.

Months back I began making notes on the book Bringing the Devil to His Knees: the Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. My hope was to use the book in my Lit 150 class in place of Burroway’s Writing Fiction: Guide to Narrative Craft. I’ve never used a collection of essays and have always used more of a textbook so this term should be interesting. Don’t want to over think the course but for some reason I’m beginning with the last essay in the book called “How to Tell a True Story” by Margot Livesey. I’m beginning here because I always begin Lit 150 with a non-fiction assignment. Always begin with a focus on factual essays and memoir type pieces. I think it important students begin utilizing their own lives for their fiction that will come later in the term.

And I suppose it fortunate the essay come in the section called Facing Up to the Reader. Teaching students to decide on the narrative strategy in moving from essay writing or working on and reading creative non-fiction. Trying to encourage my students to figure how their own lives will play out in their fiction. How their own human failures will play out in the drama and conflict of their own work. I always find it important that my favorite non-fiction writers are my favorite fiction writers. Tobias Wolff, Joan Didion and Denis Johnson to name a few. I guess I feel this way because I enjoy the ways these authors convince readers of their fiction the events they write on are true. Perhaps this comes from their skill with non-fiction. Perhaps it is because as Livesey explains the work is “messier, more confusing, in other words more lifelike.” She calls this anti-fiction.

And I guess I begin with non fiction because I am trying to push my students towards this style of writing because this is more or less my style of fiction writing–or rather anti-fiction writing. Livesey also explains how she believes that most writers make this decision or thought process unconsciously. And I guess I do value memory over imagination in my own work. And she argues we value author’s “credentials” over their creativity. The narrative authority coming from the real world of facts and the details of their lives over creative license. But I do want them to find out the line between themselves and the book. I do want them to think of how their lives and identity find their way into the work.

Here are my notes for today’s Banned Books Reading at Lincoln Land Community College:

Anthony Burgess’ classic 1962 dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange is 49^th on the American Library Association’s Banned and Challenged Classics’ list.

According to the ALA website:

In 1973 a bookseller in Orem, UT was arrested for selling the novel. Charges were later dropped, but the book seller was forced to close the store and relocate to another city. Removed from Aurora, CO high school (1976) due to “objectionable” language and from high school classrooms in Westport, MA (1977) because of “objectionable” language. Removed from two Anniston, AL High school libraries (1982), but later reinstated on a restricted basis.

I was first introduced to this book, I’ll honestly say, through the film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick. I like Stanley Kubrick movies.

That led me to searching out the book in bookstores and I have to say the book is much more brutal and disturbing than the film. Alex is played by a 28 year old actor yet in the book Alex is 15. In the film the girls attacked are over 18 and in the book they are ten years old.  

Perhaps what I found in this philosophical novel and in the character of Alex, Burgess’ fifteen year old narrator and protagonist, was an intellectualization of violence in society. Our hero is a gang leader as well as a intelligent lover of classical music, he lives with his parents, and he is also a rapist and a convicted of murderer, a very unique and yet also a very contradictory character to say the least. I’m all for complication in literature.

In the course of the book Alex is sentenced to a fourteen year sentence and also volunteers for aversion therapy—only to shorten his sentence—and after this experimentation by a team of doctors he loses his choice and also loses ability to make a moral choice. He becomes good—involuntarily—with no ability to defend himself. An ingenious satire dealing with the question of youth and psychological conditioning–behaviourism (or “behavioural psychology”) of the 1940s to 1960s as propounded by the psychologists John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Alex is not punished but rather dehumanized. (Side note this is very similar to CIA’s Project MKULTRA of the 1950s. Yes, the US Government has invested in mind control and also chemical castration.)

As I read I was consumed with themes of morality and also free will, also flawed Christian interpretations of morality. Critiques of modern criminal justice systems.

Simply I found ideas in this book—an intellectualization of incredibly important subjects such as gang violence and crimes against women, the nature of good and evil, ethics of social engineering—I found these rather heady ideas in place of a glorification of social problems as I find in contemporary mainstream films and pulp novels. Most films really glorify violence or exploit violence rather than intellectualize the problems and systemic causes of such violence.

In short this book made me think, a thing mass media television and movies rarely ask me to do.

I’m going to read a passage from Alex’s aversion therapy—where he is shown graphic scenes of violence after being shot full of chemicals.

Also I think it is important to mention the idioms or slanguage that drives the narration, so I found the mix of Russian and British slang utilized to tell this story so unique in representing a possible future youth culture of metropolitan London.

This morning I’m reading “Spanglish: Tickling the Tongue” by Ilan Stavans. Ilan Stavans is a Professor of Spanish at Amherst College in Massachusetts and published this article in 2000. What interested me most about this article was Stavan’s focus on some background of language mixing and–the 150 year history–and his point of view which seems to be similar to mine. I particularly like the way he expresses how the languages in the Americans “cohabit promiscuously”. Yet he also points out opposing views and differing perspectives on mixing of Language–the main stream English point of view as well as the conservative/intelligentsia Latino point of view–the need for a common language. I like the idea that he also focuses on literature and how writing becomes the place where there is the most “experimentation”. He describes that there are many Spanglishes representing many writers and cultural communities. I also had no idea that the Spanglish movement as her refers to it again had so much history and also organized as somewhat of a crusade. I was particularly interested in the comparisons Stavan makes–compelling comparisons of Spanglish to Ebonics and Yiddish–comparisons to the Avant Garde of the Harlem Renaissance. Particularly I was interested in the comparison at the literary level of Yiddish and how Yiddish has become prominent to represent communities publicly and openly and also established by writers and poets. And again it seems Stavans sees Spanglish as fighting integration rather than a giving in to English–Latinos breaking the pattern of assimilation or the pattern of Eurocentric control. A more mutual acculturation and not a surrender. Spanglish as a “hybrid street register.”

I’ve been thinking more and more about Spanglish and why it feels so natural to write in a certain style–or speak in a certain style. I think I like Spanglish so much in the fiction because I am trying to capture the way the old folks spoke to me. I’m not trying to create something new or something of my generation though that is partly it I guess. Something essence rare. But the Abuelitos spoke in Spanglish. Simple as that. The old man said things like: I need to wash that old truckito, or That cabron pulled his pistola and nearly killed him, or he would say, I need to fill my thermos with some of that café your Abuelita has got there. Or get the stropajo and clean this shit up.

And I love the way they spoke–the cadence and the ease of tongue. It wasn’t Cervantes’ language and it wasn’t Langston Hughes’ but it was theirs and it was real. It became mine. And I want to breathe new life into the old folks in the fiction. Show you what it was like for me and how I further imagine it was for them. I want to represent as well as recreate the old folks.

And the other day I received a rejection letter from a publication I assumed was okay with Spanglish and Spanish idioms I use in my writing. I send so much work out. And after following the link sent to me to check the submission guidelines, I surmised that the criteria of English-only is what I violated. I can only guess. I met the deadline and the word count and the theme. Had to be the English. (Oh and I guess the strength of the writing.) And I’ve blogged about Spanglish before and my feelings on the importance of bilingual bi-cultural publications for bilingual bi-cultural writers. So today as my students wrote their formal essay assignment I researched a listing of articles on Spanglish. I was surprised as to what I found. And I’ve been thinking about writing about it. Here’s what I found and what I’ll be working on for a while with posts to follow:

“Spanglish: Tickling the Tongue” by Ilan Stavans

“Spanglish is Here to Stay” by Isis Artze

Demystifying Language Mixing: Spanglish in School by Peter Sayer

The Power of Theme and Language in Multi-Cultural Communities by Kathleen Kelly

On so-called Spanglish by Richard Otheguy and Nancy Stern

“Spanglish”: The Language of Chicanos by Rosa Maria Jimenez