Literature

First, an apology. When I wrote a piece last January entitled “Re: a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn,” I should have used a better heading. It was a pertinent quote in the review. And then came a bit from a review in the New York Times, which I suggest below at (1). What happened to me tonight was a journey in time and I give some sites at (2).

Two literary giants of my generation were being interviewed by a knowledgeable host who really wanted to know why it took them so long to write a book dealing with Hitler. Gunter Grass speaks very good English in a strong voice but has some difficulty hearing so he had a lady to repeat the questions in German. You will be able to read and perhaps hear what he had to say. Then Norman Mailer came in, and they were to have a dialogue. I’m assuming you, who care to, can find the conversation.

Just the three of us. Me and Norman and Gunter. I didn’t know Mr. Grass very well and I would apologize to him if I could see him in person. In very good shape. It’s the first thing we octogenarians think about. After all those years since 1945 the German people have to remember how things turn out, and it will be until his children and grandchildren’s lives are spent, the author says. I nodded back to him. We here are still in the same boat. Don’t we argue and discuss whether America made it too easy on Stalin? Or gloat about the wall falling?

Kurt Vonnegut, the post-modern Mark Twain, died yesterday after suffering for two weeks of brain injuries related to an accident at his NYC residence.

I have to admit to being ignorant about his work --he's one of many American writers I overlooked during my college years to focus on his Latin American counterparts.

I got how funky he could be through his essays and interviews as well as his constant criticism of the Bush administration. Yet it's his becoming the subject of the Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen urban legend that made him take cool to a whole 'nother level.

The man was what myths are made off.

Here's the brilliant hoax and here is a parody featuring Yoda --yes, The Yoda from the Star Wars movies.

VAYA CON DIOS, Kurt! You were a storyteller, a teacher, and a friend.

You may think you've gotten off easy, my good man! But I promise to infect as many minds as I can with your pearls of nonsense, and recommend your books to every wand'rin child I find. In this way you shall live on. As you ought.

Adios, mi amigo.

And so on.

I have mentioned it before, that when I travel for panels or conferences, it takes me a few days to get back into blogging.

Day trips actually get to me more than transatlantic or transcontinental trips. At least I can sleep if the trips are more than 4 hours long. On short trips, I rarely get to rest --even at the hotel. I guess I am a creature of habit that is sensitive to change.

Which explains my kids comment from the other day.

When I travel I get "penalized" for my absence. I don't think The Kids mind my absences so much as their father who then ... ahem ... disappears during the evenings for the next few days after one of my business trips.

This changes the dynamics of evening reading since, due to his work schedule, that's become his one job in the evenings. And it's one job he usually does as I prepare for my second shift of work in my usual 10-12 hour work days.

(Ensayo publicado en La Sarten Por El Mango: Encuentro De Escritoras Latinoamericanas (Colección La Nave y el puerto), Puerto Rico, 1985)

Las Tretas del débil
Por Josefina Ludmer

No hablaremos de la literatura femenina con rótulos ni generalizaciones universalizantes. Con esto queremos decir que rechazamos lecturas tautológicas: se sabe que en la distribución histórica de afectos, funciones y facultades (transformada en mitología, fijada en la lengua) tocó a la mujer dolor y pasión contra razón, concreto contra abstracto, adentro contra mundo, reproducción contra producción; leer estos atributos en el lenguaje y la literatura de mujeres es meramente leer lo que primero fue y sigue siendo inscripto en un espacio social. Una posibilidad de romper el círculo que confirma la diferencia en lo socialmente diferenciado es postular una inversión: leer en el discurso femenino el pensamiento abstracto, la ciencia y la política, tal como se filtran en los resquicios de lo conocido.

Hablaremos de lugares. Por un lado, un lugar común de la crítica: la Respuesta de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz a Sor Filotea; por otro lado un lugar específico: el que ocupa una mujer en el campo del saber, en una situación histórica y discursiva precisa. Respecto de los lugares comunes (los textos clásicos, que parecen decir siempre lo que se quiere leer: textos dóciles a las mutaciones), interesan porque constituyen campos de lucha donde se debaten sistemas e interpretaciones enemigas; su revisión periódica es una de las maneras de medir la transformación histórica de los modos de lectura (objetivo fundamental de la teoría crítica). Respecto del lugar específico, se trata de otro tipo de discordancia: la relación entre este espacio que esta mujer se da y ocupa, frente al que le otorga la institución y la palabra del otro: nos movemos, también, en el campo de las relaciones sociales y la producción de ideas y textos. Leemos en esta carta ciertas tretas del débil en una posición de subordinación y marginalidad.

This is a total navel-gazing moment but eff it, it's my blog!

I'm in a lot of physical and emotional pain. Forty has hit me like a frying pan on a toon's nogging and it has taken me almost a month to write about my passage into official middleagehood because ... well ... it's painful.

I don't like it.

It sucks.

I hate being old.

Not because I look old but because I feel old. Every bone and muscle in my body has started to sink into decrepitude. I don't feel emotionally older than 30 yet here I am seeing my body crash and burn further and further away from my self.

What is worse than the pain is the horrible, terrible fear that keeps me awake at night : Four years ago I woke in a pool of sweat, smacked with the horrible realization that I would be cursed with ... the gift of longevity.

You'd think that Little Annie Terrorist's body of work is sufficiently unique that she need not plagiarize the work of others; but you'd be wrong. The republican party mouthpiece is a plagiarist, reports the right-wing New York Post.

July 2, 2006 -- Conservative scribe Ann Coulter cribbed liberally in her latest book, "Godless," according to a plagiarism expert.

John Barrie, the creator of a leading plagiarism-recognition system, claimed he found at least three instances of what he calls "textbook plagiarism" in the leggy blond pundit's "Godless: the Church of Liberalism" after he ran the book's text through the company's digital iThenticate program.

He also says he discovered verbatim lifts in Coulter's weekly column, which is syndicated to more than 100 newspapers, including the Fort Lauderdale (Fla.) Sun-Sentinel and Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle.

SHILOH JOLIE-PITT?? Sounds like a sponsored archeological dig site . . .

The NYT reporter who herself was given a middle numeral in place of a middle name -- Jennifer 8. Lee -- wrote a story a few weeks back about the exploding popularity of the newly created girl's name Nevaeh (some MTV rocker spelled "heaven" backward to create some unique magic, and made his daughter's name quite ordinary in the process.)

When it comes to the private lives and to mother power especially, I might snort or satirize a bit but I let the private choices and divergent experiences of other folks wash over me like smooth waves of electromagnetic force. I ponder possible connections and contrasts in my own experience, but I seldom consider how to disrupt and redirect their course to one I'd find more suitable or seemly for them.

So here's the flow of my thoughts today --

Moms creating, delivering and naming new babies is ordinary magic, the kind I've practiced privately myself. Celebrity moms like Angelina Jolie or Gwen Stefani deliver their unusually named babies to a riveted world though the same kind of ordinary creation magic that humble and anonymous moms and dads experience, the same everyday "real magic" through which every muggle who ever lived in this real world arrived.

I was attacked once, in a televised crowd of almost 100,000 people in the streets -- assaulted and battered on the sidewalk after a huge hometown football game in Gainesville, Florida.

Please understand I was hometown fan but no fanatic, a sober, sanguine 40-year-old mom who'd just succeeded in becoming pregnant again though I didn't show, didn't yet even know. I'd been faithfully abstaining --from alcohol, obviously not from sex!-- with the hope in mind.

So why did the attack happen to me, what did it mean?

I was on foot with my husband, leaving the stadium across the grassy field where some brash, privileged young frat boy type (wearing the same team colors as I, does that mean he was "on my side?") had parked his sporty first-tier-access car. Maybe Daddy was a big booster? Or the kid could have been a Master of the Universe himself -- it WAS the '90s.

Our team had just lost a fair --and fairly humiliating-- fight to our major in-state rival. We were the team the TV commentators loved to hate, so no one wearing orange and blue was feeling great.

But it was objectively beautiful weather (my happy hormones might have been kicking in already?) and win or lose the game, I had every reason to be enjoying it among my fellows, or so it had seemed.