From Xico

The English Language Book Exchange at Caftan Rojo, Xicoténcatl 44 on the corner of Zaragosa in Coatepec (in other words, maybe three blocks into Coatepec on the street you take when coming from Xalapa) is woefully unadvertised.  Especially for fiction lovers, it is a bountiful resource which can save big bucks on Kindle purchases.  Spanish speakers who would like to improve their English skills by reading will also find tons of choices here, from pretty easy to read mysteries to really convoluted classics.  UNFORTUNATELY, you'll have to wait till next week (maybe Wednesday) to be able to wander around the shelves because the room housing it all is being repainted and I think new shelves are being put up.  However, you can browse the stacks of books on tables in a nearby room if you promise not to knock any of them over.  The non-fiction is also in this room and is SHELVED.  

In addition to English language books, there is a pretty hefty selection of Spanish books now in boxes under the tables in the nearby room.  The Spanish books include classics, journals, fiction and poetry as well as translations from English of some popular mysteries.  Diving into PD James in Spanish helped my Spanish.  You haven't read an English mystery until you've read it in Spanish.

The guiding rule is supposed to be "Take a book, bring a book" meaning you can keep what you take it if you replace it with something else or return the original.  HOWEVER, there are now too many English language books so you can pretty well keep what you take.  

What started me on this post is the book I just added to the two piles of books sitting near my front door waiting to be returned.  The book I just finished, The Royal Physician's Visit by the Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist (I promise to return it) is one I never would have thought to look for if I hadn't been helping move the books to ready the library for painting. Or maybe I would have: you can browse the hundreds of books at your own pace and find any number of unexpected interest to delight you.

So The Royal Physician's Visit. Set in the late 18th century in Denmark, its seed is the reign of King Christian VII. This is an historical novel, but the history is invisible.  Enquist isn't interested (I don't think) in providing period details of ladies' finery or castles. Rather, he paints complicated and sensitive portraits of people who come to seem as vivid and real as people you know.  He writes in multiple styles, drifting from classic story-telling to something resembling journalism, then jumping to sudden, abrupt descriptions and short choppy sentences punctuated with multiple question marks and exclamation points. Sometimes he circles around and comes back to literally repeat himself after having taken us to a different place.  He weaves in ideas about madness, corruption, ambition, decency.  He asks, through his characters, whether indeed the ideals of the Enlightenment which are supposed to be the foundation of our own nation can survive in the real world.  Everything is turned upside down.  Is evil necessary for good, not to provoke good, but simply for good to exist?  

Well, enough.  Please make it a point to visit the Book Exchange, especially after it is back together again.  It'll sure save you some of the money  you might spend on Kindle books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Catholicism in the Most Catholic State in Mexico

I've realized certain things about faith and religion and myself over the years.  And about my husband and the same issues.  I seem to have a faith gene or seed or something, and my husband doesn't, unless a scientific approach can be considered religious.  I've stamped my foot at his cool demeaner as he pronounces something superstitious.  He's not into scientism like Richard Dawkins: he's truly rational, truly looking for material evidence, truly willing to change his mind if he finds reason to.

I on the other hand have this sense of something beyond my ability to perceive it (them?).  So he will label something a superstition and I will say it's not superstition.  For instance, he will say that people crossing themselves as the pass a church or a tiny capilla is superstition.  I'll say, not exactly, I don't think.  I think its respect, maybe habit, too, but not truly superstition.

We both agree that often religion, or at least religious organizations, can serve a lot of purposes besides being centers of any kind faith,  although they can enfold the faithful, too.  In the US right now, nuns, many of whom I know are truly faithful, are under attack by the Roman Catholic bishops, some of whose faith I would doubt.  I wouldn't doubt their sense of entitlement to power.

All this is to say that the Catholic Church and Catholicism are like any human constructs: the are broad umbrellas even if only a few people are under those umbrellas, as in the case of one Catholic household, or if there are multitudes as in the case of the whole Church. A panopoly of belief and non belief exists within the institution.  Faith itself doesn't need a church I don't think. And there can be faith that there is true evil as well as good, and that there are forces of indifference, unconcerned with the consequences of that the may wreak.

With this in mind, I have, as I've said before, found myself intrigued by religion, and especially Catholicism, in its many manifestations here in Mexico.  And of course you must remember that I write as an outsider.  

My husband commented on my post about Catholicism in Mexico that he didn't really think, for instance, that Semana Santa was about going shopping or going to the beach for everyone, or even most people.  I do have to say that I agree with him.  It is that for a lot of people who are urban, educated, and rich. And some of them may combine shopping with religious observances. The beach is also a mid-Semana Santa treat for those of considerably more faith.

I am going to break things down a bit in looking at Mexican Catholicism. Otherwise I'd drown. I thought I'd start with what some USAers might assume is typical of Mexican Catholicism: that found in Guanajuato where the Pope made his state visit a month or so ago, the state which claims a population that is 95% Catholic, the highest rate in the country.  

My husband and I visited the city of Guanajuato about ten years ago to take a two week intensive Spanish course: hardly time enough to know it more than superficially, but enough to find it quite delightful.  It's a very pretty small city, busy, filled with people, and things to see from silver mines to a mummy museum and (to my husband's delight) a mathematics center, from beautiful churches to colorful winding streets folded into the steep hills.

We stayed with a family just outside the center in a house probably built in the 1960s or so. They were used to having foreign students as long-term guests and were cordial and at ease with us and so made us comfortable with them.  They also had an enormous cross with a crucified and really bloody Jesus hanging over their bed which made a somewhat chilling impression on me. But religion didn't come up as a topic of discussion that I recall.  They talked about the high cost of electricity, of taxes, of their grown children and ours.  We watched some television together, including The Learning Channel in Spanish.

After our classes which were held in classes in rooms built one on top of each other leaning against an old wall and building, Jim and I walked all over and we took a fair number of pictures, none of which we can find at this point.  We can't even remember if we used a digital camera or our old SLRs.

All of this is to tell you that I am going to talk about Catholicism in Guanajuato by way of Carlos Fuentes's book, Las Buenas Consciencias, or The Good Conscience as it is usuall titled in the English translation.  After failing to find our pictures or pictures of Guanajuato at the beginning of the 20th century in any organized place on Google, I decided to just post some photos from the web to give you an idea of what it looks like, at least today.  The some of the real places mentioned in Las Buenas Consciencias still exist.

Much of the book takes place in the house of Jaime Caballos, the protaganist, and his father, aunt and uncle.  The house is fictional, but it sits on a street across a small plaza in front of the Church of San Roque, a real church, which is the family's parish.

Below is a map of what is now downtown Guanajuato. You can get a slightly larger version by clicking on the map.  You'll also get tools for decorating the map.

 At the center left you see a reddish dot identified as Iglesia San Roque.  In front is the little plaza.  One imagines that Jaime and his family lived perhaps on Calle San Roque or one of the other streets that is directly across from the church.  The Universiy is in the upper center part of the map, the Teatro Juarez which is across from a beautiful park is slightly to the right, and slightly towards the bottom.  Pictures of these places are below.  The aquaduct is not on the map and it isn't mentioned in the book as I recall, but we did see it and were impressed.  If I remember it was further from downtown than the house we stayed in.  I just liked the photo.

 

The church of San Roque

 

 

Plaza in front of San Roque with and without a fiesta.

 

Calle San Roque.  Jaime's family was bourgeois and prosperous.  Perhaps they lived in a house like that at the right.

Another view of Calle San Roque from the top

Guanajuato at night

 

The University of Guanajuato

The aquaducto

Teatro Juarez which sits across from a lovely park.

Las Buenas Conciencias is set in this lovely place.  But it is not a lovely novel, although it is an excellent and complicated one.

 

 

 

The Globalization and Ideology of Intractible Poverty

Katherine Boo has written a book called Behind the Beautiful Forevers which is an examination of the poor that dominate India still, in spite of the myths of the success of global capitalism.  It could be describing parts of Mexico.  Or the US or anywhere else where there is a rich upper class that has benefited from The Washington Consensus approach to life.  I have not read it yet, but I have read the review in the New York Times.  Here, from the review, is the ultimate condemnation of our currently dominant global sysem:

Boo describes what happens when opportunity accrues to the already privileged in the age of globalization, governments remain dysfunctional and corrupt, and, with most citizens locked into a fantasy of personal wealth and consumption, hope, too, is privatized, sundered from any notions of collective well-being.

In this sense, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is not just about India’s delusory new culture of aspiration. For as Boo writes, “what was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too” — in Nairobi and Santiago, Washington and New York. “In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament.”

“The poor,” she explains further, “blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.” Meanwhile, only “the faintest ripple” is created “in the fabric of the society at large,” for in places like Mumbai, “the gates of the rich . . . remained un­breached, . . . the poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.” In its own quiet way, “Behind the Beautiful For­evers” disturbs this peace more effectively than many works of polemic and theory. Transcending its geographical setting, the book also provides a bracing antidote to the ideological opiates of recent decades — those that made the worldwide proliferation of gray zones appear part of a “great success narrative.”

I am struck by (among other things) her statement that "the poor blame one another for the choices of government and markets..."  What is it that Red American poor are also doing?

 

On Reading in Spanish

A couple of posts ago I wrote about what I might or could know about Mexicans and mentioned that Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz was supposed to offer clues to Mexicanidad.  Since then I have read the whole Laberinto de la solituda of Octavio Paz. In Spanish yet.  Why in Spanish?  We  were brought up with the notion that reading something in the original is better than in translation.  This issue has some relevance to the discussion of foreigness, I think. 

I discovered that (probably to the horror of my Spanish teachers) I could get through reading a fair amount of Spanish by reading English-language mystery stories and bestsellers in Spanish (junk, in other words, I guess.)  The first one I attempted a number of years ago was a John Grisham novel – I can’t remember which one.  Indeed it was eye opening (or ear-opening maybe).  The first thing I noticed was how strange the cadence was.  Grisham´s characters personify the US south.  They don’t have Spanish accents or even a Spanish lilt – EVER.  At that time, I was still pretty awkward in Spanish so I had to look up what seemed like every other word. Doing this led me to realize just how much of a book is in the translator’s hands.  The translation for one word would seem apt to me, for another it wouldn’t.  It is very hard for a translator to find a way to express the author´s culture rather than his own.  Often the flow of the language seems generic, if I can call it that, or more like that on TV. 

Also I realized that as a native English speaker, I was familiar with a wide variety of English without giving it much thought.  Thus, the English of Dickens, of PD James, of Walter Mosely and George Pelikanos doesn’t phase me and more important, tells me something about place and character.   I could pretty much tell a fair amount about the background of authors and characters and where they came from.  I do have trouble with some UK English, I have to confess. For years I had a very hard time making any of these distinctions when I read Spanish.  Spanish slang, which varies from place to place REALLY baffled me.  I could start to tell a few things about writers in Spanish especially the fact that Spanish writers often use longer sentences and more words than current writers in English.  And I actually got to where I could recognize that some writers just weren’t very good.  I got to the point where I thought many Spanish language writers liked William Faulkner,maybe in part because HE liked long, convoluted sentences. I can now kind of tell styles apart: Gabriel Garcia Marquez vs. Carlos Fuentes, for instance.  And I can get absorbed in the stories, too, and make somewhat intelligent comments.

But I persist in reading US bestsellers in Spanish translation.   I read books I have not read in English.  And I think the virtue in doing this lies in reading non-literary Spanish; reading conversational Spanish.  I think this kind of reading is good for everyday Spanish.

At this point, I can kind of overlook the weird Spanishness of translations of PD James, for instance.  I’m not sure how that came to be or whether it has to do with the work itself.  NowI’m reading Aeropuerto by Arthur Hailey in Spanish. If that isn’t a potboiler I don’t know what is. It’s  okay and easy which means I can read a LOT of Spanish at once.  At this point, the Spanish doesn’t make the characters sound misplaced in Chicago.  I suspect partly it’s because Hailey’s English is pretty generic and can be translated into pretty generic Spanish, but this isn’t the whole reason.  I think one’s brain does some shifting from one language to another in terms of shades of accent and tone and so forth as one gains experience.  Reading Spanish works in the original language as a native English speaker raises for me the question of whether indeed it is always better to read something in the original.  Andrea Camilleri, an Italian author is reportedly so happy with the work of the man who translates him into English that he gives him prominence on his title pages.  Camilleri is an interesting person to think about translation with.  His series of detective stories set in the not-so-imaginary town of Vigata in Sicily feature not just Italian in the original, but local dialects.  Apparently Camilleri works with these dialects so that even Italians who don’t speak them can get the flavor and still understand what the characters say.  Stephen Sarterelli who is the translator manages shades of dialect in English which sound faintly like shades of New York (New Jersey?) Italian to me and which work quite well to add color.  Now obviously I wouldn’t be able to appreciate Camilleri in Italian, but I do in English.

I’m moderately fluent reading Spanish.  I can read pretty much without a dictionary.  This is what our instructors wanted us to do: read wihout a dictionary.  But there are drawbacks to being a foreigner and reading without a dictionary, and I really am not sure that any but the most fluent of foreigners can really read a book in a foreign language and get the real original flavor this way.  For instance, I don’t have the easy flexibility of knowing the same word’s meanings in various contexts without thinking about it or looking it up. This leads me to feel a certain stiltedness and lack of spontaneity.  AND it matters where you look it up!  Dictionaries vary hugely.  I find that wordreference.com is the best option since it has not only long lists of possibilities but forums where different nuances are discussed.  Of course this slows you down a bit.  One approach I like is to start out looking up a lot of words.  Authors tend to repeat their vocabulary, so after awhile, with the same author, you look up less and less and can get more into the flow AND learn more and more vocabulary.  I took a course in the short stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez from a wonderful, lively, very literary Colombian who was teaching at UNAM in San Antonio because he had had to leave Colombia as a political refugee.  He LOVED Colombia and he loved Garcia Marquez and after reading many, many stories with him guiding us, I really think we got the hang of Garcia Marquez in his native Spanish.  It was WONDERFUL.  AND much to his joy, our maestro got to return to Colombia.

A problem with reading Mexican or Latin American or Spanish Spanish literature as opposed to popular stuff is that it is literature: it doesn’t help that much with going to the store to buy milk or asking your neighbor why there were four military Humvees at the entrance to the colonia or how their sick child is or whether they think the new governor is any different than the old.  For this, go for the junk novels in translation I say.   And read them out loud if you don’t get much out-loud practice every day.

 

 

 

On Reading in Spanish

A couple of posts ago I wrote about what I might or could know about Mexicans and mentioned that Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz was supposed to offer clues to Mexicanidad.  Since then I have read the whole Laberinto de la solituda of Octavio Paz. In Spanish yet.  Why in Spanish?  We  were brought up with the notion that reading something in the original is better than in translation.  This issue has some relevance to the discussion of foreigness, I think. 

I discovered that (probably to the horror of my Spanish teachers) I could get through reading a fair amount of Spanish by reading English-language mystery stories and bestsellers in Spanish (junk, in other words, I guess.)  The first one I attempted a number of years ago was a John Grisham novel – I can’t remember which one.  Indeed it was eye opening (or ear-opening maybe).  The first thing I noticed was how strange the cadence was.  Grisham´s characters personify the US south.  They don’t have Spanish accents or even a Spanish lilt – EVER.  At that time, I was still pretty awkward in Spanish so I had to look up what seemed like every other word. Doing this led me to realize just how much of a book is in the translator’s hands.  The translation for one word would seem apt to me, for another it wouldn’t.  It is very hard for a translator to find a way to express the author´s culture rather than his own.  Often the flow of the language seems generic, if I can call it that, or more like that on TV. 

Also I realized that as a native English speaker, I was familiar with a wide variety of English without giving it much thought.  Thus, the English of Dickens, of PD James, of Walter Mosely and George Pelikanos doesn’t phase me and more important, tells me something about place and character.   I could pretty much tell a fair amount about the background of authors and characters and where they came from.  I do have trouble with some UK English, I have to confess. For years I had a very hard time making any of these distinctions when I read Spanish.  Spanish slang, which varies from place to place REALLY baffled me.  I could start to tell a few things about writers in Spanish especially the fact that Spanish writers often use longer sentences and more words than current writers in English.  And I actually got to where I could recognize that some writers just weren’t very good.  I got to the point where I thought many Spanish language writers liked William Faulkner,maybe in part because HE liked long, convoluted sentences. I can now kind of tell styles apart: Gabriel Garcia Marquez vs. Carlos Fuentes, for instance.  And I can get absorbed in the stories, too, and make somewhat intelligent comments.

But I persist in reading US bestsellers in Spanish translation.   I read books I have not read in English.  And I think the virtue in doing this lies in reading non-literary Spanish; reading conversational Spanish.  I think this kind of reading is good for everyday Spanish.

At this point, I can kind of overlook the weird Spanishness of translations of PD James, for instance.  I’m not sure how that came to be or whether it has to do with the work itself.  NowI’m reading Aeropuerto by Arthur Hailey in Spanish. If that isn’t a potboiler I don’t know what is. It’s  okay and easy which means I can read a LOT of Spanish at once.  At this point, the Spanish doesn’t make the characters sound misplaced in Chicago.  I suspect partly it’s because Hailey’s English is pretty generic and can be translated into pretty generic Spanish, but this isn’t the whole reason.  I think one’s brain does some shifting from one language to another in terms of shades of accent and tone and so forth as one gains experience.  Reading Spanish works in the original language as a native English speaker raises for me the question of whether indeed it is always better to read something in the original.  Andrea Camilleri, an Italian author is reportedly so happy with the work of the man who translates him into English that he gives him prominence on his title pages.  Camilleri is an interesting person to think about translation with.  His series of detective stories set in the not-so-imaginary town of Vigata in Sicily feature not just Italian in the original, but local dialects.  Apparently Camilleri works with these dialects so that even Italians who don’t speak them can get the flavor and still understand what the characters say.  Stephen Sarterelli who is the translator manages shades of dialect in English which sound faintly like shades of New York (New Jersey?) Italian to me and which work quite well to add color.  Now obviously I wouldn’t be able to appreciate Camilleri in Italian, but I do in English.

I’m moderately fluent reading Spanish.  I can read pretty much without a dictionary.  This is what our instructors wanted us to do: read wihout a dictionary.  But there are drawbacks to being a foreigner and reading without a dictionary, and I really am not sure that any but the most fluent of foreigners can really read a book a foreign language and get the real original flavor, this way.      For instance, I don’t have the easy flexibility of knowing the same word’s meanings in various contexts without thinking about it or looking it up. This leads me to feel a certain stiltedness and lack of spontaneity.  AND it matters where you look it up!  Dictionaries vary hugely.  I find that wordreference.com is the best option since it has not only long lists of possibilities but forums where different nuances are discussed.  Of course this slows you down a bit.  One approach I like is to start out looking up a lot of words.  Authors tend to repeat their vocabulary, so after awhile, with the same author, you look up less and less and can get more into the flow AND learn more and more vocabulary.  I took a course in the short stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez from a wonderful, lively, very literary Colombian who was teaching at UNAM in San Antonio because he had had to leave Colombia as a political refugee.  He LOVED Colombia and he loved Garcia Marquez and after reading many, many stories with him guiding us, I really think we got the hang of Garcia Marquez in his native Spanish.  It was WONDERFUL.  AND much to his joy, our maestro got to return to Colombia.

A problem with reading Mexican or Latin American or Spanish Spanish literature as opposed to popular stuff is that it is literature: it doesn’t help that much with going to the store to buy milk or asking your neighbor why there were four military Humvees at the entrance to the colonia or how their sick child is or whether they think the new governor is any different than the old.  For this, go for the junk novels in translation I say.   And read them out loud if you don’t get much out-loud practice every day.

 

 

 

On Grief and Sunshine

After my brother-in-law´s death and funeral I still find that there are days when the view out our windows looks flat, when the lush life that lines our roads looks harsh in the glare of the sun.  That I am actually accomplishing anything worth accomplishing seems impossible.  I am surprised that I am so affected by John’s death, that it flows through my veins, that I want him to come back so badly.  I cannot imagine how much my husband still feels as he lives each day.

After Jim came home from Alaska and before we went to Oregon for John’s funeral a couple of weeks ago, I had a doctor’s appointment, just a medication review.  But unlike for you folks in the US, our doctor will spend an hour with us, even more, if there’s something that needs talking about.  And of course John was on my mind, as was Jim.  And all of us were on the doctor’s mind.  So the doctor and I talked about Jim and John and me. Of course I told him I was worried about Jim who seemed distant and somewhat short-tempered.  The doctor gently reminded me that mourning happens in different ways for different people and takes different lengths of time.  Sometimes people don’t even think about the death itself, instead they get angry at lots of silly little things.  Sometimes they get angry at people they love. Sometimes they worry about them incessantly.  Sometimes they just clam up and withdraw. Sometimes they get completely depressed as in clinical depression.  Sometimes they rail against God if they believe in him. Maybe they drink more than they usually do, or eat too little.  Or fall behind in work or projects. We talked about how profoundly affecting the death of a close brother would be.  I told the doctor how I wanted to “fix” Jim, but how Jim didn’t want me to “fix” him: didn’t want suggestions or hovering.  And the doctor told me, just be there.  And just be there for yourself, too.  So, I asked, out of curiosity, really, since not much time had passed since John’s death, when is it too much time that a person is spending being lost in mourning of one kind or another?  He shrugged.  Not really something you can define.  After a while, though, if you don’t start to feel better some of the time, and then a little more of it, maybe after three weeks or six months, or a year or whatever, then maybe it is time to think about doing something more.  Of offering or getting help.  What kind?  It depends: a priest, a therapist, a death counselor. But, he said, I should remember that grief is part of life and sometimes the best therapy is just being together quietly with the person you love: not withdrawing.

I think that loved ones, dead loved ones, should remain woven into the hearts of the living, for it is not clear there is anything more than that, and that is all we can really offer them and keep for ourselves. So mourning should soften, but maybe not be fully recovered from.

Today I found this that my favorite famous online rabbi David Wolpe said:

Advice for those who are close to individuals dying or grieving a loss.

I have three words for them. 

Presence, in other words be there around the other people who are suffering. 

Silence, don't feel that you have to say something because some of the most foolish things that I've ever heard have come from people who are attempting to comfort those who are in trouble because they feel they have to say something. 

And availability. That is, be ready to talk and to listen without forcing it. 

And those three things together create a community of grief and every grief seeks community.

More than that I'm not sure any of us can offer each other but that's an awful lot.

 +++

Yesterday, in honor of the dead from 9/11, Rabbi Wolpe quoted this wonderful poem of Edna St. Vincent Millay:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. 

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: 
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. 

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. 
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust. 
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, 
A formula, a phrase remains, — but the best is lost. 

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love, 
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve. 
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world. 

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; 
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. 
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. 

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

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No HBO Thriller to be developed by yours truly plus some commentary on thrillers as novels

Just to let you all who didn't realize that my post on Fast and Furious was meant as a bit of a joke....the "plot" is actually ongoing in our real world, along the Arizona-Mexico border and in Washington, DC. Check out the links.  It was simply an alternative presentation of the news, or maybe reality has truly become an alternative presentation of TV and movie thrillers.

Speaking of which...novel-reading can provide an excellent introduction to realities which few of us experience. As a compulsive reader, I snatch at anything that offers intellectual support for my habit. One of my favorite bits of support came from a visiting professor of family therapy at George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University, where I received my MSW.  Arthur Mandelbaum, the visiting professor from the Menninger Clinic, gave one of the best classes I have ever had anywhere. And he said, read novels, read novels, read novels.  He wasn't referring to trash, but to novels,(not necesssarily classics: good mysteries and hard-boiled detective stories count), which opened up  private worlds which we could never know any other way. Great TV series can do this as, as anyone who was sucked into the vortex of The Wire knows.

In the western world, let's say the educated upper reaches of the western world, and let's say particularly in the United States (I really don't know much about European thought) there has been a tendancy to replace experiences which might deepen empathy for other humans (and animals and plants, I could easily add: for the planet, in fact) with scientific approaches.  Rather than enhancing our knowledge and wisdom, the culture has chosen to use these dare I say so-called scientific approaches to narrow them.  

Three areas which particularly interest me in this regard are psychology/mental health, medical care in general and cross-cultural, cross-social strata awareness especially when national policy is seriously affected.  Obviously these are enormous areas and I am only writing a blog.

So here I just want to mention once again, perhaps from a slightly different perspective, the fact that US foreign policy not just towards Mexico is made by very smart, very ignorant people and that it doesn't have to be that way AND then to recommend some books.

This is the fiftieth anniversary of the US Peace Corps.  Jim and I were early members.  Jim entered a program which took him to Ethiopia 45 years ago, I entered one for Uganda 43 years ago.  We each underwent three month training programs before our two-year terms began.  As I've said before, it changed us deeply and forever and our experiences are probably why we have chosen to live where we live in Mexico.  

Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, has written a proposal for reforming the Peace Corps, updating it, if you will.  As he says, things  have changed over fifty years.  He accepts the original mission and goals:

To promote world peace and friendship and

     1.   To help the people of interested countries in meeting their needs for well-trained men and women;

     2. To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of people served; and

     3. To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

Here I'd just like to talk about the third goal, the promotion of better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

In many ways, those of us who have returned have done a lot in small and big ways to act on our own increased understanding of the lives of the people we lived among for two years.  But still I think we are a vast underutilized resource perhaps because we often don't fit standard models of "experts" and we may not be in public life.  

As Kenny points out, although there are now vastly more opportunities in a vastly more interconnected world for people to see and serve poor countries, the Peace Corps remains one of the rare organizations in which volunteers learn another language and stay in another country for an extended period of time.  And they stay in areas which are where ordinary people, often very poor, live.  He says the training teaches mostly language.  When we had training, we also learned the history of our host countries and were placed as student teachers in non-middle class schools and non-middle class living situations to test our ability to adapt and accept. We had lectures by people from Uganda on cultural issues as well.

Of course the training is never the real thing.  And, looking back, the real thing was incredible.  We were privileged to have been permitted so far into a foreign culture: almost like reading a novel.

To my knowledge, no groups of us Uganda volunteers were ever asked as a group to talk to people in the US government about how local Ugandan culture should affect our government's foreign policy efforts.  Why should this matter?  Foreign policy and aid policy is often made by people who have no clear idea of how most people live in a region or country. Nor do most Americans.  I think of images of India and Brazil in the US press.  Because  India and Brazil are presented as "economic miracles", few in the US realize that by far, most people in those countries do not come close to a US middle class existence.  It's also important to understand, and few do, that maybe they don't want to. Which doesn't mean we should just drop out of the world.  We need perhaps an understanding of urban Indians and rural Brazilians that would help people charged with policy to understand the difference between statistical measures of income growth and real life. 

I have mentioned too many times the lack of any deep knowledge of Mexico on the part of those who make policy towards Mexico, or even a sense of humility in the face of a lack of knowledge.  We need to reframe how we see the world.  National governments are societies onto themselves, and small ones at that.  They are made up of human beings just like the rest of us, and it is hard for the members to conceptualize the fact that their policies can truly damage the lives of millions of people -- and that economic and aid policies are among those that cause damage. It's the same (or worse) with corporations.  The vast number of people in the world are mere abstractions to the leaders.  And among corporate leaders and government leaders are many who seem to have lost their souls.

If leaders who so profoundly affect the lives of those they've never met and have little or no knowledge of (see Hillary Clinton in Mexico) don't have time to come and maybe visit for a few weeks in ordinary neighborhoods, returned Peace Corps volunteers are a tremendous asset, especially since leaders certainly don't speak most of the languages of the people of the world. (And there is now Peace Corps in Mexico, surprise surprise.  I had no idea.)  Returned volunteers could act as bridges, in a manner of speaking, presenting not statistics, but stories of real people -- as well as reminders that even two years or ten don't really make one privy to all the workings of another culture.  Then maybe leaders wouldn't be misled into thinking that, for instance, US troops will be welcomed with open arms or that Mexico is a nation permeated with violence. Or that people with kind hearts and advanced degrees can know what's best for people who live in mountain villages.  

Okay.  Books.  It's not that you have to read novels of the places you are studying or working in necessarily (though this is a good idea), it´s that by reading about other places (Other Voices, Other Rooms, if you will*) you can't help but open your soul to the varieties of human experience.  

There's a telenovela on now based on the novel Queen of the South (Reina del sur) by the Spanish author, Arturo Pérez-Reverte.  Pérez-Reverte is a Spanish author, but this book is about a Mexican woman who becomes a powerful narcoboss in Mexico.  It isn't a nice book, but it offers a what shall I say, a less abstract view of narcodealers, one in which you may find yourself having some sneaking sympathy for the characters.

Also half about Mexico but by a non-Mexican: Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna.

To come to understand that though not on as obvious a scale, drug stuff goes on in the US and that corruption and so forth does, too, and again is in the hands of people you might have some sneaking sympathy for, I highly recommend the books of George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, Walter Mosely and on and on.

To escape to Scandinavia and its predictably gloomy but extremely interesting characters, try Jo Nesbo or Henning Mankell.  Read the books in order.  I love these books.  

 

 *Truman Capote.  Read everything he ever wrote.

 

 

A Great Text on Western Civilization

Note: The edition I did the index for is available for preorder at Amazon.  I did not do the index for the currently available edition.

I had meant to retire from indexing. I stopped looking for work. Then a book came along that was really tempting, so I did it. And then some more. So I am still indexing. I have just finished three books that were very time-consuming, so I haven’t blogged for a while. I’d like to mention the last one. It is a Western Civilization text book called just that: Western Civilization. Originally two volumes, it has been condensed to one, and that’s what I indexed. The author is Jackson J. Spielvogel. I had not heard of him, but I sure wanted to find out about him after I started reading. He is now an emeritus professor at Penn State where he has won great renown as an outstanding teacher and textbook writer.

The book Western Civilizaton is extraordinary for a number of reasons. Spielvogel writes about all kinds of people, not just kings and queens and presidents. He often reminds us that throughout history, most people have been ordinary people: not rich, not fancy, not influential in the world, but nonetheless they have been by far the largest number of people, and their fates have often lain outside their own hands: they’ve had to serve in armies, they’ve been victims of disease, they’ve been slaughtered and brutalized and made serfs and enslaved. More or less chronological, the narration nonetheless does not provide a long list of dates to remember. Rather, Spielvogel provides glimpses across the years of a century, say, of the effects events and people had on each other: religion on rulers, loss of meaning on art, the Black Death on people’s attitudes towards being alive. There are few heroes. There is no underlying belief in progress or a happy ending. Rather, currents ebb and flow. Capitalism is not the salvation of man, nor is the Enlightenment idea of progress. In fact, the Enlightenment itself, at this point such an unexamined foundation of much US and western culture is presented as more or less as one of many systems of thought and belief which were efforts to give sense and order to life. That’s not quite fair. Spielvogel addresses the very real achievements of science and art, among other things. But he certainly doesn’t consider Enlightenment thought the path to salvation. I will just stick in here the fact that in Spain at least, the Enlightenment, contrary to its influence in England and France, was used to justify the inequality of human beings: to explain to the peasants and the merchants and the servants that hierarchy was the natural order of things, and they were on the bottom rungs. Groups that receive short shrift in other texts, or at least the ones I know of (and I am WAY out of date) are here in sympathetic detail: Jews, women, prostitutes, for instance. Gays. When he discusses art and music and literature, he introduces people I’d never heard of but who nonetheless in some significant way personified their eras or changed them. Art and music and literature are not apart from history but woven right into its tapestry. It’s a wonderfully readable book. If you want to once again after many years dig into Western Civ, do it with this book. It was so readable I spent too much time reading it and ended up probably giving the index short shrift. 

The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver: Read It!

TypePad is back with its features, and I'm not ready! Or I am, but right at this moment I can't do anything substantial. All I am going to do is tell you that The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver is a book you really, really ought to read for many reasons.

Perhaps the first reason is that the first half of the book, set mostly in Mexico City will blow you away.  It is possibly the best non-Mexican-written portrayal of Mexico I have ever read. And for you who don't read Spanish, of course it's in English. It is rich in description of the stuff that at least some of us Americans who love living here love about Mexico: stuff I can't really pinpoint in a list, but which permeates me. 

The second reason is that the characters are fully brought to life, very sympathetic, captivating, heart-breaking.  Kingsolver merges historical people with fictional flawlessly.  Her hero, the fictional Harrison Shepherd, will live on in your soul after you finish.  Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and especially Leon Trotsky will, too.  I have no idea if her versions of these people are accurate, but I don't really care, so interesting and rich are they in the novel, so flawlessly mixed into the story.

When the novel moves to Asheville, North Carolina, I feared that it wouldn't be so interesting.  In Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver lost vibrance when the story moved to the US.  The US just isn't, at least at first glance, as luminous, as rich in life as Mexico or parts of Africa that she writes about and that I know.  But here, she rises to the challenge.  The mood, the setting, are completely different from Mexico. Asheville is more sturdy greens when it is vibrant, and browns and grays.  But persist, and you will be drawn in as much as you were into her Mexico.  The story turns political, and it also turns tragic, enraging and into a most remarkable love story.

Kingsolver describes the growth of anticommunist witch hunts stirred up by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and carried out eagerly and sometimes with a bit of shame throughout the US by describing the effects on Harrison Shepherd.  It is eerie, frightening and all too contemporary.  It is hard to imagine this happening again in large parts of the country, yet it isn't really, not when you read this book. Kingsolver captures beautifully our country's tendancy to fall into mindless, hateful, harmful extremes of behavior.  I found myself so upset that at first I skipped sections so I wouldn't have to deal with them.

This isn't a traditional novel.  The story is told, the characters described first through the diaries of Harrison Shepherd, then and increasingly through newspaper articles and book reviews, all giving a sense of immediacy and a sense of foreboding.

The last book I liked this much was Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.  Both books are alive, characters in both so much of flesh and blood that it's hard to remember they never really lived.

Rudolfo Anaya otra vez

Rudolfo Anaya writes wonderful novels.  From New Mexico, he fills is pages with the color of the New Mexican landscape and the people (and mysterious beings) in it.  If you are looking for something to get you going reading Spanish, while Anaya writes in English, for sure Bless Me Ultima is available translated into Spanish.  I haven't thought of Anaya for a number of years.  One melancholy memory I have is getting all excited to go to a book signing he was doing in San Antonio, TX in a Barnes and Noble in a mall facing I410 -- the Loop -- on the north side, a soulless place if ever there was one.  Hardly anyone turned up!  I couldn't believe it.  Anyway, here is a snippet that appeared on the Big Read Blog sponsored by of all things the US government.  Check it out. Un hombre muy amable.  

 

Rudolfo Anayo