Existentialism, Magic 8 Balls and Dagoberto Gilb

There’s this journalism ethics code that I’m bound by and it states that it’s a conflict of interest to review a book by someone you know. Everyone knows that it’s near impossible not to know of someone in the writing community and in the Mexican American writing community it’s peor. I mean, everybody knows everybody, we’re one big ol’ dysfunctional family.

I told one publication that wanted me to review a book by someone I know that I would do it if I were allowed full disclosure. That would have meant that I state that I know Dagoberto Gilb and studied with him at Texas State. Would have to tell everyone that he was the reason I went to the university, etc. And because they have journalistic integrity they passed.

I’m not sure if blogs qualify as journalism but for my purposes I’m going to say they don’t, and I’m outta journalism anyways. Sorta. I really never believed in the ethics codes they drilled into us at J-school, took every freebie that was offered so as not to offend the generous giver. So here I sit with a blank page to fill up with my thoughts after reading Gilb’s The Flowers.

Ay, this book, this one really does it for me, as I read it I wanted to cheer because finally, finally someone gives a real picture of what urban youth are like. Gilb’s main character Sonny Bravo, although a teen, is older than his years, smarter than anyone gives him credit for, and self-sufficient, thanks in large part to his absent mother. Gilb really shows how some poor urban youth grow up quickly because they are left to fend for themselves.

Some early reviews have stated that Sonny Bravo is similar to JD Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. In my view, there really is no comparison, one is a weak spoiled child driven by insecurities and imagined fears and the other is a strong survivor driven by insecurities and an innate morality. Holden, who was born into wealth and privilege, viewed life from atop the middle (maybe upper-middle) class power structure, whereas, Sonny sees it all from the bottom up, giving readers a much needed (and never really seen) perspective. I also liked that Gilb dispels the stereotype of poor urban youth as ignorant fools.

And I think it’s misguided to call Gilb’s work “a coming of age story” because Sonny, although just a teen, is mature beyond his years, does teenage things, yes, but is more grounded, rational and thoughtful than those adults who are suppose to be his guardians. These two books offer two very different places, teenagers and mindsets.

If a comparison were necessary, then Gilb’s Sonny would be closer to the narrator in Richard Wright’s Black Boy because this narrator, like Sonny, grew up against the dominant white power structure in an urban environment. However, even this comparison is not accurate because religion played a large role in shaping Wright’s agnostic leanings and Sonny’s walk offers a glimpse to existentialism.

Ah, man, did I just write that? I hate big words and existentialism is one of them words that automatically makes my eyes bob like the die in a magic eight ball when you shake it—reply hazy, try again. So here it is better, Sonny’s mundane life in The Flowers apartment complex reflects the reality of living, living for yourself, without a God and creating your own destiny. Which is another reason I loved this book. No stereotypes of Mexican Americans attending mass on Sundays and nary a Virgin de Guadalupe in the novel. Wow, another side to Mexican Americans. Who knew? We’re not just the clichés we’ve been reading about for ages. He treats Sonny as a complex individual, which makes this story so much better than Salinger’s kid book. The, true to life, racial tensions alone make this a noteworthy effort.

Sonny’s long, boring days spent doing chores at the apartment complex where things and events are forever happening to him, and he reacting, and thus making more things happen—having his first sexual encounter, falling in love, getting involved in people’s lives, making discoveries. This book’s pace reminds me of Gilb’s first novel “The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña.” However, this is a more bearable story for me because it is at least hopeful.

Although, I am a Gilb fan, I don’t necessarily like everything he writes and I didn’t particularly like Mickey Acuña. It wasn’t the writing I disliked but the place the book took me emotionally--Mickey’s constant state of going nowhere. It was a bit too real, rung too true. It took me back to my childhood, the stagnant, go nowhere type of life that I was forever repeating and often still do. After I finished the book, I shivered and said to myself, I never want to feel that again. Can you “not like” a novel for all the right reasons?

The Flowers I enjoyed for its romanticism, sweetness and optimism. Sonny’s finding in Nica all that is right and good with the world, and his eventually helping her out, creates meaning out of a seemingly meaningless existence. The bittersweet ending reminded me more of Jane Austen than Camus or the other humorless French dude who writes for all the big word readers.

Perhaps it’s best that I’m confined to review Gilb’s effort on a blog because I’ve yet to read the book again and perhaps on my second go around, I’ll make some more discoveries.

KGB BAR NYC

I read at the KGB in NYC with Erika Wurth the other night, so I have to tell you how it was. It was really good. We met a Native documentary film maker from the Southwest who currently lives in NYC. I enjoyed the aura of the bar. I was surprised people were so very attentive to our poetry! Since it was a bar I thought they would be drunk. Instead they were attentive and respectful. At least 20-25 people showed which is great.
The KGB bar is decorated with what appears Soviet Union decor. Pictures of Lenon and the other guy Stalin were hanging on the red walls; red flags and other communist regalia were a bit unnerving though somehow appropriate. Symbols of communism fallen were everywhere.

It seems we read in the red room since everything was red but I'm not sure that's what it was called. The KGB bar reading made me want to move to NYC. Afterwards we went somewhere else for more drinks. The price of the drinks was reasonable really. I find NYC prices to be okay actually. Finding a place to live is what sounds expensive, although my new apt. in Lafayette, CO (just outside Boulder) is only 100.00 cheaper than the one a woman lives somewhere near Harlem and the Upper East Side.

And what about all those books you haven’t read?

I was looking at the shelves in my bedroom trying to figure what book to blog about and what jumped out at me was not all the good books I’ve read but all the books I haven’t. The books I, with the best of intentions, started to read and got a chapter or a few pages into and then for some unknown reason stopped.

What it is that compels a person to read an entire book? I know when a book gets me, it usually works its magic in the opening pages and then I’m hooked until the end.

I have this friend who has this “reading ethic” I admire. She shames me because my reading habits are lazy. Once she starts a book she feels obliged to read it to its end, even if she gets bored by it or doesn’t particularly like the material. She breezes through two books a week and this is a woman with four children.

I’ve got several armfuls of books lingering on my shelves because I keep telling myself that I am going to read them in the near future, that I must read them for literature’s sake. I guess the truth of the matter is if they don’t hit me emotionally or have something I can relate to in the storyline then they aren’t going to get read. Why fool myself?

I keep hoping that just because I didn’t like something when I was younger doesn’t mean I won’t when I’m older. Tastes change and to prove it, I keep all those unread books around the house.

Which brings me to my Bookmates book of the month—Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera.” I’m trying, trying to get through it right now, but man, some of Garcia Marquez’s sentences still make me roll my eyes.

“Dr. Juvenal Urbino had often thought, with no premonitory intention, that this would not be a propitious place for dying in a state of grace. But in time he came to suppose that perhaps its disorder obeyed an obscure determination of Divine Providence.”

This is not my favorite sentence and the book is loaded with similar ones. I hate the sound, the pomposity, and the alliteration “premonitory, propitious, place.” And this is just one example. Here’s where he gets me though, later in the same graph there is this dead on genius description, “The use of crutches had made his torso and arms as broad as a galley slave’s, but his defenseless legs looked like an orphan’s.” It’s beautiful, perfect, something I can picture and says so much about the observer. So it’s up and down for me with this dude. Up and down when I read him, so up and down that my mind wanders. I can’t get interested in Dr. Urbino or his laundry lists of medicines. I’m just not interested in this love story.

On the other hand, in Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” she had me hooked from the very first paragraph—a young woman struggling with her role as a daughter. I liked her idea of love in a post-apocalyptic world. Argh, I need help being a better reader or at least liking Marquez because everyone makes such a big deal out of him. What am I missing? What?

Langston Hughes

I have been reading Langston Hughes' THE WEARY BLUES (Knopf 1939). At first, on the page, the poems seem simple, and yet when read aloud the rhythmical blues can be heard, the beat like a slow swaying dance. Weariness is the opposite of energy. He was raised in Harlem with 8 siblings and a father who struggled to feed them. He lived when lynching was popular in this country. Like so many poems, Hughes' poems are meant to be heard and recited, breathed forth from a living body. They are living things. He was exiled in a sense from the South he loved. Here is the beginning of the title poem:

The Weary Blues

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway . . .
He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!

This collection also contains a favorite poem of mine. Possibly the poem is one of my top 10 favorites. It is called THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS. My new collection has a poem that echoes this (I can only hope), but the river I write about is the Rio Grande. Hughes' river was the vibrant culture of African-Americans, the beating swoon of the blues, the jazzy horns and glitzy renaissance of his era, the mystical and varied history of a people. Hughes had an ear for musicality of a line, and I think he offers young poets a great lesson in listening.

THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS

(To W.E.B. DuBois)

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
Went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
Bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

The poem takes the first person I, but applies it to his people. Here the political is artistic, subtle, yet strangely powerful, almost surreal, as if a dream. Such bold risk; here the first person "I" defies all criticisms of self-indulgence and shows what a poem can do with the first person "I" singing. And that's all I have to say about first person I, but Robert Vasquez has some interesting commentary on the "I" in contemporary times at his blog California Poet.

Always judge a book by its cover

I’m posting again because Ms. Luna is traveling from El Paso to Boulder to settle in for the school year. She’s a professor at University of Colorado. After she gets settled she’s headed to New York City for the AWP conference and some readings. If you’re in the Big Apple at the end of January you oughta check her out: 7 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 26 at the KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street New York, NY (Cross Streets: between 2nd and Bowery) where she’ll be reading with Erika T. Wurth and Gabe Gomez. I wish, wish, I could be there to go to the U.S. Latino Writers speak out: A Literary Response to the Immigration Crisis panel, Luna’s readings and the Con Tinta partay, which are always fun, oh, I mean intellectually enlightening.

There’s this book I wanted to write about but haven’t really gotten to discuss with Sheryl so here’s my disclaimer: for those who love poetry please read Sheryl Luna’s blog, I am only riffing here about a poet whose work I enjoyed recently and I don’t know diddley about the form as you’ll soon learn. What’s the famous line? “I don’t know much about art but I know what I like.”

I picked up Shin Yu Pai’s chapbook because I liked the cover with its rectangular cut outs to read the words printed on the end pages. I liked it because immediately I was forced to really examine the book itself.

And there, just like that I bought my second chapbook ever, well, not ever but I don’t count those that were required reading for class. And why are books of poetry called chapbooks anyway? Why not just book? It’s not like poets are like them 19th century peddlers selling chapbooks for a penny to the working class at alehouses. Hey, wait a minute, that’s exactly how I came across “Sightings.” I was drinking with a friend in Dallas and saw a chap selling books and I picked it up.

The first poem I read out loud to my companion was in the Unnecessary Roughness section of the book:

since the gay
old days of
this country
the American pastime
of manhandling
the opponent
taking down
to the ground
the player
holding the ball
SMEARING
THE QUEER


I can’t do it here but what is also so effective about her work is that she uses typeface to help convey meaning. In her book the word SMEARING is in some kind of Trade Gothic narrow font with an effect on it to give us a sense of the smearing. I had to touch the page to make sure my vision wasn’t blurred from too much drink.

The second piece I read aloud, again in the Unnecessary Roughness section, on a solitary page was merely this:








last one
picked

This one got us onto the topic of the author herself. We looked at her picture inside and theorized, guessed that she was “picked on” in school. I argued that she had to have been because well, she’s different. The different-ness I spoke of got us to taking guesses at Shin Yu Pai’s ethnicity.

After that curiosity was played out, we scanned the pages of her book and talked about white space (all the stuff between the words). How effectively Shin Yu Pai uses it on the pages. Whether or not you can create a sense of white space in prose. I thought of a chapter in Moby-Dick, the one where Melville describes the whiteness of the whale. Told my friend, "You know how there is so much description that you just get tired of reading it and your mind blanks out, skips graphs." She laughed and mentioned that the entire book qualifies as white space then. We stopped our Dick talk because we were distracted by another one, who asked us “Did you want to buy the book? We’re closing up.” My friend and I agreed that what I’d just read was “some good shit” so I put down my drink, shut the beautiful book that I could palm with one hand, and dug through my purse for some cash.

I knew I was getting something unique before I even opened it. The cover gave me all the information I needed before I turned a page. It’s innovative, clever and yeah, a little pretentious too but not to the point of being obnoxious, the way some poetry can be.

In my opinion good poetry should be so smart and tight that it has layers of meaning, one for the quick reader or scanner (non-reader), another for the middle reader (who reads Best Sellers), and still another for the thoughtful reader with millions of books swimming around his head (scholars who dissect words until they’re gray mush). This book passes my silly litmus test.

I liked that Shin Yu Pai used everything available to her as a writer, bookbinding, cover design, typeface, white space and even art to give us a glimpse into her world. “Sightings” seems to me to be a book about her. And what I’ve surmised is that she’s the type of woman who is: visual, intellectual, funny, sarcastic, sympathetic, ironic, and perhaps, a bit pretentious at times but grounded in the arts. Here’s a book you can definitely judge by its cover.

Bitter? Maybe

While we’re on the topic of Rigoberto, I must say that his review of my book in the El Paso Times turned me on to a writer from El Paso I’d never heard about—Estella Portillo Trambley. I had no idea Portillo Trambley even existed and I’m FROM El Paso. I can’t believe my high school English teachers didn’t assign her book “Rain of Scorpions” in class. I even made it through UTEP without knowing her works. I think I’d be a completely different person knowing that someone who taught in El Segundo wrote award winning books and plays. Imaginate, a third-generation Mexican American teenager reading a book written by someone who grew up in the very same city she grew up. I might have taken the fiction writer path much sooner in my life having read a book that was so important that I was assigned to read it in class right along with Shakespeare and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Okay, so I got on the Portillo Trambley bandwagon late in life. What’s new? Am I bitter, well, maybe, but I’m glad I’m aboard now. Portillo Trambley’s prose is the kind of literature I love. Stories filled with tight dialogue and sparse descriptions. It’s the Juan Rulfo kinda sparse—no pretension, clutter, or wasted words. Every word on the page advances her story.

Her tales give a complete picture of the men and women not given a voice in Texas literature, the people we live with, love, know and root for in our own families. Men like Chucho and women like his wife, Juana in “Pay the Criers.”

This, my favorite story in the collection, is a case study of a co-dependent relationship, if you’ll pardon the 12-stepese, and in it Portillo Trambley tells a beautiful story, of a family living in Juarez, Mexico that could just as easily have been El Paso, Las Cruces or Ames, Iowa for that matter, that explains why women stick it out with “shiftless” men. It’s done without being preachy, judgmental, or sentimental.

Portillo-Trambley’s stories and in particular the story of Chucho, Juana, and his mother-in-law, Refugio, reminds me of Luis Jimenez’s art work. In so much that the images or stories she constructs are true to life and not always appealing, but real, bold, revealing. It is in the truth and revealing where the beauty of the piece lies.

In the story she gives a complex portrait of Chucho, a man, who upon his mother-in-law’s death described her as someone “who had died like a warrior in the midst of the daily battle for bread. The old woman’s life had been nothing but work…. She had been a tiger, wearing a shawl, carrying a rosary in her hand, ready to pounce on him for being what she called ‘shiftless.’ ”

True to his mother-in-law’s description Chucho, coaxes the money for her funeral out of his wife’s hands and spends every centavo. But because Portillo Trambley understood what makes a fundamentally good story, well rounded characters, and gave me a glimpse into Chucho’s psyche through his internal monologues, meeting with his friend Chapo and his wife’s conversation with her friends, I grew to understand and even like the man. Like him so much that like his wife, Juana I rooted for him to do the right thing and even hoped/prayed while reading the story that he would change his fundamental nature.


Speaking of which, Portillo Trambley’s life in El Paso and some help from my father made me aware of what it is I love about El Chuco. She taught in the El Paso public schools and my father was in her history class at La Jeff. What he remembers about this award-winning author and I quote, “Yeah, she wrote books. What I can remember is that she had great legs and we were always dropping our pencils trying to look up her skirt.” This attitude is what I hate and love about El Paso. It sums up an El Chuco native’s core, how we know so much, and yet, don’t take ourselves too seriously. A way of living people either get or don’t. My father then went on to tell me how her “escorpion” story was good but that he didn’t like reading plays.

It really is crime that her revised collection of “Rain of Scorpions” is out of print, especially now, when American culture is so entangled with the Mexican. All of the United States is becoming like the El Paso I grew up in, where we don’t know where Mexican ends and American begins. Hers is too important a voice to leave lingering on a shelf. It needs to be in as many hands and minds as possible, not because she was a feminist, activist, or school teacher but because her stories touch on the healing power between the love of men and women and how the Chicano culture is the culture that is going to connect the traditional to the new. She has been quoted as saying that Chicano literature is “a bridge between the old and the new, between the primitive and technological. The Chicano can cement tradition to changing trends; a restructuring toward universality; the new American, the cosmic man.”

And in Chicano literature her book is the bridge between the pastoral musings of Antonio in Rudolfo Anaya’s “Bless Me Ultima” and the urban Chicanos that Dagoberto Gilb writes about in his books. “Rain of Scorpions” is where the two worlds meet, mix and morph into the modern day Chicano. This woman, not only defined the new Chicano, but “left a map for other” writers (be they Chicanos, halfies, mixed or steps who grew up in Mexican households, again, it’s difficult to pinpoint where Mexican begins and American ends) to follow or make new paths, “left a map” for us writers to find our “own green valleys.” “Rain of Scorpions” is a prophetic tale that everyone in El Paso should read, especially now with all the change taking place downtown and with the reopening of ASARCO.

Review

Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Other Fugitives and other Strangers (Tupelo Press 2006) is the type of poetry book some of us may be uncomfortable reading in that it challenges our comfortable distance from homoerotic love, which like all relationships, deals with issues of darkness, dominance and survival. The very things that were once hidden come to light with poems that take from the image of the body, its fragility and fleeting transitory nature and shine. It is the naked body, clavicle, skin, eye, pelvis and its animal nature that makes these poems honest and genuine in terms of the speaker’s dealing with human flaws and triumphs. In a sense, the poems themselves are a love song to the body. In “Good Boy” the speaker asks, “Wasn’t I a good boy once? Wasn’t I/ once stripped of body hair and knuckle, a laugh/so clean it stretched like a white sheet on the clothesline?/ Wasn’t my voice once/ the contagious note of a two-fingered-bell?” This first stanza for the opening poem sets up the book which is in many ways is a movement or dance through boyhood innocence to a masculine desire for dominance. Later in the same poem we hear, “Surely my anger had always been squatting its claws, eager/to tear its way out of my ten-year-old ribs…I must have ingested hatred/ through the spoons of my childhood./ I must have been the changeling matured/ of a knife slit haunted/ me, so I carved it free.// I hold your head up like/ a trophy, rub your scar. Please promise me it won’t cut/ back. I don’t like to bleed.”

It is in this manner of examining the wound, whether it is a psychological cut, physical injury, internalized or externalized, the wound is the cause or the impetus of what comes after injury and it is this recovery with which the collection moves readers. Many poems deal with the exhaustion of abuse and the urgent desire to separate out of a protective need.

In “Neurotic Double” the straight-edged honest tone continues with a series of images that exude the aftermath of struggle. “I’m not ashamed of my naked body,/ my naked body is ashamed of me,/ of how I tinge/ and stain him, then blame him for what I did./” The internal battle of our own existence with a body that in the end will betray us with age and death is ever present in these beautifully haunting poems. A poem called “Body, Anti-Body” also exudes the violence of an internal battle. “…displeased, my flesh/began to seek those strangers/generous with touch. With them/ I’m not a name, I’m body./ I’m not a ghost, I’m living skin// that craves the skirmish scars/ of passion and taking stock/ in the dark of nick and bite/ the bruise, the stench of triumph/ thickening air. These men act// on instinct, with violence/ that drives and thrusts and imposes/ pure punishment upon me.” This animalistic and desperate urgency to exist as a corporeal being in the world of living things carries with it the need to feel.

Poems like “Welts off the Bone” continue with an onslaught of reminders; we are human and we are body. There is a questioning of religious faith “We lock our limbs to crush the saints we don’t believe in./ We snap shut the pretense of altar alms, the delicacy of foreskin against cotting in the sacristan’s cassock.” The new and revised communion is with the speaker’s lover. “Everything that’s you is me. No secrets, love, pure confession./ The wafer of your ear is raw is sweet.” These poems are in the here and now and they breathe with a strange urgency, a need to live aggressively and yet there is the constant questioning of such dominance in its very presence in the collection.

The poems themselves are dangerous and they themselves “risk and love for things exotic.” We are indeed fugitives with debts and life is a series of losses and resolutions. Despite the serious mood of many of the poems there is a sense of comic relief. In “The Untimely Return of My Dead” the speaker opens, “With three loud knocks my dead lover/ makes himself known. His first complaints, I suspect:/ Why did you change the locks? Why, goddamit,/ did you bury me in blue? Makes me look fat, for crissake!”

Gonzalez’s Other Fugitives and Other Strangers is about our own sense of otherness or separateness in a world of pain and joy, how we partake in living, and how we survive. This is a poignant yet edgy collection of poems that cuts through to what it means to be human like a razor.