Chacón in Chuco

The Parallell World of Photoshop

2011-09-22T08:04:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago I was at the Photoshop World Conference in Las Vegas. It was three days of Photoshop and Lightroom workshops, as well as an expo where they displayed lighting, must-have photo software, and other pricey photography equipment.

There were amateur photographers, professionals, and the world’s leading experts on Photoshop, who were the teachers, the workshop leaders, offering such sessions as “The Eyes are Window of the Soul, taught by Fay Sirkis. She showed us how to enhance the eyes in a portrait, like I tried to practice on the model below.

More than a computer program, Photoshop is a matrix, where unlimited reality is created, where anything you can imagine can come to be, if you know how to navigate the controls.

A friend mine told me that the photographer David Smith said Photoshop is way of life.

I can spend hours in Photoshop playing with images, just for fun, just to be creating images.

In Las Vegas I took classes on things like using raw in Photoshop as a smart object, and how you can reenter a raw image over and over, play with the tone and color and all those other things that need to be decided before you make a jpeg.

I wasn’t the only one to not know that you could use raw in Photoshop, because like most users, I played with the image-as-a-whole in raw, adjusted things like white balance, fill light, sharpening, and then I opened it as a psd in Photoshop and played around, the raw possibilities of the image having long been chosen, never to go back again.

But I learned how to use layers of raw in Photoshop, enhancing the blue of the water in this image, without having to enhance the blue in the rest of the image, and without touching a pixel, without changing a thing of the original image.

Am I sounding geeky? I hope not.

I sometimes lament the role I chose as a fiction writer. It doesn’t matter how much money I don’t make, I still have to write fiction.

I’ve been lucky, but it doesn’t matter if the book I’m working on now comes out with a big New York press and is reviewed by The New York Times, I’m still going to write it.

Along with millions of other people who need to write.

There are more excellent fiction writers (and poets) than ever before. More books now than ever before, more independent presses, more self-published books, ebooks, so many writers desperate to get published that they’ll pay for the chance to do so.

Like all the other writers, I don’t care how many books I sell, I write.

Writers write.

I don’t care if ten or a thousand people read this sentence here, this one, now, I’m still gunna write it, and I’m still gunna re-write it, until it sounds just right.

I will release no syntax before its time.

And now, for my hobby, I have chosen the sins and pleasures of my father, my father the photographer, who back in the 1970s kept thousands of dollars of equipment in the trunk of our 1964 Impala, and who shot weddings for extra money, who built a dark room in our garage, who, after he retired from working as an electrician, went to Mexican bars and snapped Polaroids of drunk couples and sold them for five bucks.

I’m into photography, for better or for worse.

And I‘m not alone.

Photoshop world was like another conference I regularly attend, AWP, thousands of creative writers and wanna-be writers and teachers of writing. Here, there were five thousand photographers and graphic designers and those who have made it big in their world.

In our world, there are millions, pero millions of photographers, and there are more images in the world than there are people, billions upon billions of images.

Walking to the conference each day, on the pedestrian overpass connecting the MGM and New York, New York, I saw a constant blur of people taking pictures of the strip, of the fountains of Bellagio, the false Towers of Manhattan, and many of them had nice cameras, SLRs with professional level lenses.

It’s not like in the days of Henri Cartier Bresson, one of my favorite photographers, when few people could afford to buy or figure out how to use such instruments as he had, because like using Photoshop today, the darkroom of Bresson's time was always a large part of the creative process.

But theses days, almost everyone has a camera that can perform better than Bresson’s best Leica 35, and even the most popular and user friendly photo editing software can crop, play with color, tone, contrast, what would have taken hours and immense know-how in the dark room.

Technology has given us better resolution cameras on our phones, computers, iPads, and we have point-and-shoot cameras and SLRs, and we shoot thousands of images and store them on our hard drives.

There are more images in the world than there are people to look at them.

But it’s an impulse, isn’t it?

This creating imagery, capturing imagery, showing the world what we see?

Can’t help it.

So I went to the Photoshop World Conference, and I was exposed to a lot. I sat among thousands of other photographers and wanna-be photographers who care about their images. These people truly believed they would capture something that mattered. They want to create images, want to show you something that will make you tremble.

True believers at the Albuquerque Cultural Conference

2011-08-29T20:31:00.000-07:00

Everyone there was a true believer. They believe in justice, equality, women’s rights, the need to fight racism, but mostly, they believe in poetry.

They believe in the healing and changing power of words, and some of them believe even in it’s revolutionary potential.
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The Albuquerque Cultural Conference took place on the weekend of August 26-28, 2011.

The weekend began with a poetry reading, fifteen poets, who read from their books, much of which have been published by West End Press and Wings Press. In fact, the two presses publishers, John Crawford of West End and Bryce Milligan of Wings, were co-organizers for the conference.

Over fifty true believers stayed for three days for a series of workshops and panels, in an old building near downtown. There were high temperatures and with little air conditioning , but it didn’t seem to matter.

They didn’t even seem to sweat. At one point, one of the participants couldn’t hear a speaker very well, so he got up from his metal folding chair walked to the window air conditioning unit and turned it off, so everyone could hear her better. He was saying with his actions that her words meant more than their temporal comfort.

These believers not only attended sessions back to back for over ten hours a day, but they also participated in every discussion, had something to say. And many of them were accomplished writers with multiple books, such as Margret Randal and Gerald McCarthy, but still, they stayed to say what they had to say and to hear the others.

And it mattered. What they spoke of, whether about the resilience of the oppressed, the e-book, or the need to increase awareness of Chicana consciousness and move away from indigenous fundamentalism, which has traditionally been used as an agent of male dominance, what they said mattered, not only to them, but to the pending cosmic energy that is reality. They believe in dialogue.

These writers and activists are salt of the earth, people who assert positive change, who believed that their voices, like all voices, are important to move toward change, toward justice.

Clint, Texas? Oooo, doggie!

2011-08-12T13:14:00.000-07:00

Sounds like a the kind of town where everyone’s named Bubba and Slim and Mexicans just ain’t welcome unless they work in the fields or dance like Felina at the local watering hole.

But like the rest of the border here in West Texas, just about everyone is Mexican and even the few non-Mexicana around here speak Spanish.

Last weekend I went to the Festival San Lorenzo in Clint, something the local folk have been celebrating for 97 years.

"Six Tickets"
(Everyhting required tickets, drinks, rides. Here a clearly hardworking man buys tickets for his daughter or granddaughter. He carries a candle with him, of a saint.)

Of course, I brought my camera.

Everything was perfect, the beer cold, the food delicious, and of course, at festivals around here, the Gorditas were the best.

"Holy Gordita"

What stuck me most were the people. How friendly they were. No one whom I asked to take their picture said, no, and some of them wanted to pose for me.

"Not so Lil' Homies"

"Young Brother"

I’m doing something different this entry. I’m naming the photos. I don’t know why I’m doing it (although I know why I’m doing it), and I don’t know if I’ll ever do it again.

"Everybody's Happy"
(These kids are beautiful. They remind me of my sister and cousin when they were little. And look how happy there are. In fact, everyone in this picture is happy. Click on the image to make it bigger, and you'll see that even the guys you can see through the screen behind the booth are happy.)

I don’t know, maybe naming the photos is kind of crony, like naming a memo.

"King of the Taco Trucks"

"Basket Balls"

I don’t think real photographers name their images.

Some do.

Anyway.

This one below is simply called "Family." The man on the right was very nice to me and he asked me to take a picture of his family.

"Angels"

"Jesus et al"

"Pink"
(This woman in the wheelchair was so sweet. You can tell by looking at them what a nice couple they are.)

"Fish Lady"
(I love this lady. She kept wanting to pose, always smiling. She worked a game booth with little fishing poles, where kids fish for prizes, like a little pig made of paper mache)

"Fish Lady 2"

Images of Juárez: Light does not stop at the border.

2011-08-02T07:44:00.001-07:00

I’ve always admired photojournalists, but I’ve never wanted to be one. I like being a professor and a fiction writer, and I’m excited every time I start a new book.

But I love photojournalism.

I love how the images say something not only about what is going on at the time, protests in Libya, riots in Greece, earthquakes in Haiti, but they also say something universal, something about us. I admire how photojournalists risk all for the perfect shot.

I spend a lot of time on New York Times Lens, clicking through the images like I was walking through a museum.

I live in the twin cities, one of which the media constantly reminds us is dangerous, and anyone can end up killed. Recently a UTEP lecturer was killed there. Children are regular victims of bullets.

If I were a photojournalist, I would take my Nikon to the streets of Júarez. I would follow the police and get shots of bodies under sheets on the streets outside of crime scenes where children are looking on.

But when I go to Júarez these days or nights, I don’t bring a camera. I just go, usually with friends, to marches, to drink beers at the Kentucky Club, to eat a taco, and the images of the city that sketch themselves on the walls of my memory usually find a place in my prose.

When I first began to travel parts of the world, Havana, Warsaw, Marseilles, I didn’t believe in taking a camera. I was dead-set against it.

I thought if I brought a camera, it would steal the souls of the images, and there wouldn’t be enough energy left to release into the conduit of my sentences.

Of course now I know that the glow behind any point in space, thus behind the archetypal outline of any image, is infinite energy.

Still, I’m not a photojournalist. But I love that photographs can capture something that would take a thousand words to express in writing. ☺

Of course, in evoking the cliché, “A picture paints a thousand words,” I might very well be making fun of it, but that doesn’t negate any truth the statement might make.

All the shots above and below I took recently in Júarez, nuestra querida ciudad gemela, our beautiful sister. Like all human beings, the landscape within which we live in the twin cities is a passage way into dreams, El paso into imagination, into death and into the distortions fear can warp around reality. Daily we walk into beauty, into ugly, into endless possibility, into endless dead-end streets.

On both sides of the line we breathe in the same air, and the light shines and reflects equally from one side to the other.

El Paso Rasquache

2011-07-20T11:20:00.001-07:00

Moses and I went out on another one of our creative days.

We often get together on days that I’m not teaching or when he doesn’t need to be in the office, and we bring cameras or sketch pads and go out and seek to sample the beauty of El Paso.

You can click on any of these images to get a better look.

What is beautiful about Chuco is often times is a bit rasquache.

Rasquache as an esthetic has long interested me, and I can see why so many artists and writers come out of El Paso.

Raquchismo is everywhere.

I am drawn to things rasquache.

I remember when my mom was still alive, my father bought us kids a big bag of cheap Cookies, and we were trying to open the bag, but it wouldn’t give.

Finally, my mom stood up like a woman with power, grabbed a kitchen knife, and held it up for us kids to see.

“I’ll do it the Mexican way,” she said.

And she slashed off the top, and all the cookies poured into our hands and onto the table.

As I stuffed my mouth, I remember feeling so proud of my mother for being a Mexican.

What she said wasn’t suppose to be disparaging, it wasn’t playing to the stereotype of Mexicans carrying knifes or being violent, it was as if to say that Mexicans do what they have to do, with what they got, to get what they want.

Moses and I ate downtown at an independent restaurant, burrito after burrito. This is what they had on the wall.

To me Rasquachismo is related to that idea of my mother's, and the beauty of El Paso, my home on the border, are in the colors and shapes and the affordable art that makes what we have an expression of ourselves.

And the people are beautiful.

Kafka on the Beach

2011-07-10T15:10:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure, but I think that might be Max Brod sitting on the sand behind him.

Either that or it's my old friend Fernando Beltran.

It's an old photo, so I'm not really sure. It was taken before digital cameras and SLRs.

Here's a more recent photo, taken by a Nikon D5000. It's Kafka on the sand with chicks.

What advantages technology has brought us!

¡Ajúa!

Remembering Our Dead (in Juárez)

2011-06-19T16:35:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I went to Ciudad Juárez to join the march for Peace, organized to demand the end of violence in Mexico, especially in Ciudad Juárez, called by some news sources the most dangerous city in the world.

With about a hundred other El Pasons, I walked across the international bridge to join the march.

What amazed me most about this gathering of thousands was how many regular people came out with pictures and the names of their dead.

It’s as if they were there, not for political purposes, not for symbolic reasons, but because they wanted to remember their loved ones, wanted to shout their names, wanted someone to know, wanted justice, wanted somebody to do something.

I took a lot of photos that day, but the ones that struck me the most were those of the family members and friends of the dead.

I put this video together to remember.

Watch The Deaths in Juárez in People & Blogs | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

A New Image: Andrés Montoya Lives!

2011-06-06T17:40:00.000-07:00

We finally framed our new Malaquias Montoya print.

I have been a serendipitous collector of Malaquias Montoya’s work for many years now.

This is the first Montoya image I got, many years ago,
when I was a student at Fresno State, rooming with his son, the late great poet Andrés Montoya, after whom the Notre Dame poetry prize is named.

The Chican@ students invited Malaquias Montoya to speak on campus and display his art work, part of our annual Chicano heritage celebration. Malaquias kept some of the works he displayed at our apartment, which was located in a complex that everyone called the Ghetto Woods, across the street from the campus.

I remember a bunch of large packages arriving at our door from UPS, how excited we were, so many works of art from thee Malaquias Montoya, in our apartment!

For a few weeks, whenever friends came to our place, Andrés and I lied and said that they were ours, but when they asked to let them have one, we had to admit the truth.

We knew the day would come when we would have to give them back to Andrés’ father.

Fortunately, he took some pity on us, and he gave each of us an image. I chose the one above.

It depicts a Mexican illegal wrapped in an American flag, tied tight in a bundle with barbed wire, a classic Malaquias Montoya motif.

The next one is an image of Abraham Lincoln, and a quote by him.
The words Lincoln wrote often shock people who have come to my house and see the print on the wall, because they have always thought of him as a liberal, nice, non-racist kind of guy. Like much of the art movement from which he produced, Montoya challenges us with facing another angle on history, one that contradicts the lies my teacher told me.

Years later I acquired a few more Montoya images.

This one is a more recent image, given to Sasha and me by Malaquias and Lezlie when Sasha and I got married.

We even have a print from his other son, Maceo Montoya, also a wedding gift. Maceo is not only a great artist--as good as his father--but he is also a brilliant fiction writer, whose first novel, The Scoundrel and the Optimist, has recently been published to sweeping reviews and awards.

Here’s something very few people might have:

I have some watercolors painted by Andrés Montoya himself, a year or so before he died of leukemia at 30 years old.

His last few years on earth, he had started to paint and draw.

He rented a studio in downtown Fresno and painted all day long. He gave me a few of his watercolor paintings and pastel drawings.

This one, he said, was among his favorites, and he wanted me to have it.

“Thanks,” I said. “What’s it called?”

“What’s it called?” he repeated my question. “Uh, it’s called The Little Man Takes a Walk to Lodi While Praising God.”

“That’s kind of long for a title,” I said, skeptical that he wasn’t making it up on the spot.

About a year later, when he was in his hospital bed, bald from the chemo but, as usual, in good spirits, I asked him, “Hey, do you remember that water color you gave me of the walking man?”

He said, “You mean The Little Man Takes a Walk to Lodi While Praising God? What about it?”

“Er, nothing,” I said.

He also gave me some drawings as well as a painting that I keep in the garage. It’s an abstract piece, or at least he wanted it to be. It has such beautiful colors, lines and curves and swirls, but I don’t hang it on the wall, because it might reflect his more carnal desires. I mean, even though he would have denied it, it’s obviously shaped like something specific.

(Nudge, nudge. Say no more.)

One day, not too long ago, Francisco Aragón from the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame told me about the Andrés Montoya initiative. He said that Malaquias Montoya was going to create a print inspired by one of Andrés’ poems. He would make a limited amount and would number and sign them. This would help to raise funds for Notre Dame’s Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. I knew I would buy one, before he even told me the price.

The $440 was a bargain, not to mention an investment, but the fact that it helps finance the prize seemed pretty important. All the winners, Sheryl Luna, Gabriel Gomez, Paul Martínez Pompa, and Emma Trelles have become and are becoming important Latin@ voices, the ones to look out for. What a way to honor our Americas, our literature, our commitment to community and voice, our love for language and image.

Besides, the initiative will also help with the publication of Andrés Montoya’s posthumous book of poems, colón-nization, which I edited and compiled.

And it’s a beautiful work based on a powerful poem.

DW and I went to the art store and bought a frame, matting, an X-acto knife and did the framing ourselves, something I’m learning to do with my photography.
(By the way, I have been told by a reliable source that in the blogging world “DW” means “Dear wife.” I’m not sure if this is true, but I thought I’d try to get away with using it.)

DW and I put all. . . .

Naw, it doesn’t fit.

Sasha and I put all the materials on the table and measured, cut, and pasted.

Our cat Joey wanted to help, but I suspect it was more for the shiny moving things than it was a commitment to art.

Anyway, here it is framed and beautiful.

Want a tip?

Buy this work. Click here.

It’s not only a good investment in a signed work by one of the most important Chicano artists ever, but it also goes to a good cause.

It brings Andrés and his words back to life and keeps the lifeblood running through the veins of Latina poets today, keeping them in print, honoring them with the literary prizes they deserve.

2011-02-20T15:38:00.000-08:00

“If you want to see the invisible,
Carefully observe the visible.”
Talmud

Borges Aires

2011-02-18T12:40:00.000-08:00

Writers are liars. That’s one of the first things we learn. We lie. We have to, and we have the right to lie, but as Luis J. Rodriguez quotes from Antonin Artuad in the preface to Always Running, not about the heart of the matter.

We lie, but in lying we tell the truth.

Fiction is a lie.

So is photography.

It lies.

We know even some famous photographs meant to be journalistic, documentary, have been altered to create a more clear and meaningful image.

The point isn’t that the photographers cheated in the dark room (and now the virtual darkroom). The point is that the photographer wanted the viewer to see the deeper meaning of an image. The photos were meant to tell the truth, not to represent a purely material reality.

I am neither a journalist nor a photographer. I’m a fiction writer, so when I share an image, whether in words or digitally, I don’t care about representing material reality. There are more things in heaven and earth….etc

Eternal Lovers

2011-02-17T08:36:00.000-08:00

Statue Detail

2011-02-16T16:23:00.000-08:00

Bus Window Plaza Italia

2011-02-15T09:56:00.001-08:00

Buenos Aires Street Photography

2011-02-14T17:10:00.001-08:00

Art Tower Barrio Norte

Bread Delivery

Two Ladies and an Old Door

Bald Man and Rock

Cafe Window

Ice in the Desert

2011-02-07T08:49:00.001-08:00

It’s been a weird week in El Paso. The University has been closed since last Tuesday, and it remains closed today. Many people here are without water or electricity, and there is such a severe shortage of the former that government offices are closed and malls are forced to close early. Laundromats and carwashes have been forced shut, because there are “mandatory water restrictions,” including a ban on taking showers, washing dishes, and doing laundry.

It’s kind of weird, kind of (dare I say Kafkaesque?). It’s strange to walk around the deserted UTEP campus, empty of people like an abandoned Tibetan city or a lifeless landscape after the bomb.

It all started last Tuesday when subfreezing temperatures washed through El Paso like legions of evil spirits. It was actually only one degree Fahrenheit at the lowest, but with the wind-chill factor Weather.com reported that it felt like, at its worse, below 17, although for most days it lingered around below 7 degrees.

It is the coldest winter I have ever experienced, and I lived in rural Minnesota, where every family had a snowmobile in the garage and where they measured snow in terms of feet. I’ve travelled twice through Poland during the worst of winter, walking the streets of Warsaw at night, sliding along frozen puddles and covering up my face from the red sting of cold.

But El Paso, our little city in the desert, was the coldest I have ever—and many people have ever—experienced for three days last week. Water pipes froze and busted.

Accidents on the freeways and the streets were so numerous emergency services were unable to respond to all of them. Cars slid all over the roads like clowns in the ice follies or got stuck in gutters and driveways.

The battery on our car froze, so for two days I was trapped inside the building, unable to go to the grocery store, but even if I were able to start the car, I wouldn’t have been able to pull it away from the curb, because it was surrounded by snow banks on all sides.

El Paso was so unprepared for this that even now the city is suffering. It’s “illegal” to take a shower or wash dishes, and water pipes in the city’s infrastructure burst and the water has been contaminated, so we’re advised to boil all water before we use it. Yesterday at a grocery store near our house, I saw that most of the bottled water on the shelves was gone, and some man with ear muffs was piling what was left in his shopping cart, as if he were preparing for the end of times.

It’s been a strange week.

What is the correspondence for water?

What could all this mean?

Birds are falling from the sky in Arkansas.

The desert has been covered with a sheet of ice.

What’s happening?

Two weeks ago I was in Buenos Aires, one of the hottest summers I remember having there. The summer before, Sasha and I were there, and we loved the weather and were impressed by how much porteños complained about the heat.

This year it was so hot by ten o’clock in the morning that I couldn’t stand being outside unless I was underneath some three-hundred-year-old tree in some park somewhere in the city.

I went from extreme heat to extreme cold, but here’s the cool thing:

It’s nice to be home.

Home is always warm, no matter how cold it is outside.

Walking with Moses

2010-12-22T09:55:00.000-08:00

A month ago today, Moses and I took a long walk around parts of El Paso. We went to Ascaratre park and walked along the lake, and we drove to the outskirts of town and looked around.

Here’s some pictures, all of them taken on that day.

Ever since Moses and I have been friends, we sometimes walk around El Paso or Júarez with sketch pads or cameras, stopping at anything that strikes us as beautiful and trying to capture something about it, as if we were looking for treasure.

I remember when I was younger and I would walk into the field across the street from our house, or into a grove of fig trees or along the shores of Millerton Lake, and I would fantasize that I would stumble upon something valuable, a bag of money, an old coin, something that would change my life for the better.

This desire wasn’t unique with me, because on one level it was an impulse manufactured by the culture, the foundation of which is built on the economic system. It was a time when people walked along beaches and into fields and meadows with metal detectors, hoping to find some precious relic. When I was a teenager, the neighbor kid got a metal detector for Christmas, and he was so excited, certain that he would find many valuable things.

When Moses and I walk around El Paso, we too are open to discovering treasure, but we’re looking for things that we can’t possess, an idea, a feeling, a thought, the feel of a tree’s texture.

One time we went into Juarez and spent about an hour with some kids, street vendors, and we bought them sodas and drew their pictures and listened to them giggle. Moses gave them some paper and pens and they drew us and each other.

I’m in Buenos Aires today, where I’m working on my autobiography, my life story, which is painful to do. Each day I enter into the landscape of my past, and I encounter myself at different stages of my life, and it’s hard. There are some versions of me that I don't think I would get along with if we had to be in the same room together.

In many ways my life is the story of desire evolving.

Like I tell my fiction writing students, in character-based literary fiction, plot equals character over time, and the characters are driven by need, by yearning, by desire.

P=Ch(y)/T, where “y” is yearning.
.
Often, the irony of fiction is when the desire is unknown to the character him or herself, that is, they think they want one thing, but what they really want is quite different from what they’re after.

To think of my life story thus far is a painful comedy, so much time chasing after the wind, but I know it’s something I need to share.

The other day, in a used bookstore on Avenida Santa Fe, I found up a title called “Siete conversaciones con Adolf Bioy Casares” which I immediately bought.

I read this today, in a conversation he was having about what it means to be a writer:
“A veces he pensando en buscar objectos de felictdad que no cesarean en el momento de la posesion.”

I know this is a pretty standard idea, but it connects me to another idea that I find interesting.

Desire itself is the goal, the meaning, the value, not the fulfillment of the desire. The value of desire is not the possession of the object that is desired or the achievement of a desired experience, but desire itself.

Desire is pure and beautiful, because it is the will to live, no matter how mundanely it’s manifested.

Unfortunately desire can also lead to destruction, to bad things, when it is thought of as a goal that must be achieved, at whatever cost, no matter who we perceive to be in the way. We have the capacity to hurt ourselves and so many others in the pursuit of satisfying our desire.

This is an abandoned house we found on the outskirts of town, where some junkies broke into and smoked their crack or meth or both.

Still, desire itself is pure, because it comes from the same source as the will to live, it is energy, and, to cornily quote Blake, Energy is eternal delight.

That’s why young people are so full of light and life.

They are filled with desire.

Like the preacher says, Rejoice in your youth!

But to get back to walking with Moses. We go anywhere, without a destination in mind.

Sometimes when we see something that strikes us, it does so because it carries its own desire.

We sense the energy behind an image.

Sometimes I feel like a kid using a spiritual metal detector, and I kid you not, as we were walking along a path, I found this.

Happiness on the path.

I enjoyed the serendipity, but I didn’t pick it up.

The Expendables: Cuesta una vida solo 4 ‘pennies’

2010-11-10T19:03:00.000-08:00

I read it on the news.

So it must be true.

El Diaro, the one that serves El Paso/Ciudad Juraez, reports that a life is worth four pennies.

Which life I wonder.

Las Adelitas

2010-11-10T18:24:00.000-08:00

¡Ajúa!

Ask? Don't tell?

2010-11-03T08:14:00.000-07:00

When I walk around the city shooting street photography, I am often stuck by people I see, so, of course, I want to take their picture.

In El Paso the people are so beautiful I cannot help but to want to preserve an image of everyone one, to keep in my heart forever.

But like most writers (remember, I am a fiction writer first), I love to people-watch. Ever since I was a child growing up in Fresno, I loved sitting downtown on the Fulton Mall watching all the ladies shopping, all the old men on the benches by the fountains, the cholo kids zipping by on their bicycles.

As an adult one of the things I love most about travelling is sitting in plazas or thoroughfares watching people walk by, people who strike me as beautiful.

Like these ladies going down an elevator.
Maybe what compelled me to shoot them was how well they were framed inside that metal box.

They saw me, and they clearly know I was taking their picture.

What I usually do when I’m caught snatching someone’s soul is shoot more shots right at them, and to the side of them, and way above their heads, so many shots, click click click, that they know I’m not singularizing them but am merely taking pictures of the city. And in most big cities, places like NYC or LA, so many people carry cameras, I am never out of place.

One of the issues one encounters in taking street photography is how to shoot people. The photo blogs offer many hints on how to take people’s photos on the sly, so one can get real candid shots.

Whereas I appreciate the effect of clandestine shots, I also think asking strangers if you can take their picture works as well.

It started one evening in Hollywood. I had been taking candid shots of people, when I decided I was going to ask people if I could take their pictures, just to see what reaction I got.

It surprised me that mostly everyone said yes.

I liked that I was able to focus my energy on only people who said yes.

In the photo below, I didn't notice the guy looking out the window until later. Click on it to see that single eye looking out from under the cap, which gives the image a bit of tension, I think.

So for now, asking people seems a good way to go, but not telling seems pretty good too.

Ask? Don't tell?

To ask:

Or not to ask?

To ask:

Or not to ask:

I guess it depends on the moment.

I think form in any work of art is much more effective when it is at least partially the result of the process of creation itself.

Like Borges says , If you have written what you set out to write, it's probably not worth much.

On An Ordinary Day in El Chuco

2010-10-18T16:57:00.000-07:00

It was Sunday, and I admit, I'm stealing the title of this blog entry from a great book by Willis Barnstone called On an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires, in which he walked around the city with Borges, charlando, charlando, the labyrinth that Geogie loved best.

Andres Montoya too. He loved walking the city of Fresno in conversation, observing the city, looking closely into himself, speaking his heart to his evening's companion, seeing how he was created in the image of the city and how the universe was created in his image.

So one afternoon (many afternoons) I walked around El Chuco with my camera.

I paused before doorways and windows.

and got caught in. . .

"TrafiC"

(okay, maybe that transition was a bit sophomoric)

"Breaking, the Aztecs"

"Girl Eater"

"Dos Mujeres"

"The Girl, Watching, Watching."

"Dos Danzantes"

"Chicana Journalist"

"Kid"

Good night, Juarez.
We love you so much it hurts.

2010-10-15T21:24:00.000-07:00

Follow the poet Michael Medrano.

He wants to take you to East LA, aka East Los, the seat of the Chicanada.

It was me, Tim Z. Hernandez, my friend Augie, and Mike, in a rented car, skipping a few sessions of the Latino Book Festival 2010 so we could search for a house where a Mexican women from Tim Z.'s literary past used to walk the hallways and look out the windows.

I won't tell you about his novel in progress, that's up to him to tell, but I will say that it will be brilliant and beautiful.

This man greeted us at the East LA gates.

He said, La tierra de mi varrio belongs to you.

East LA is the heritage of all Xican@ kind.

The four of us entered.

We were, like this old man, on a mission.

This man welcome'd us too.

He smiled at us as we snapped his picture, as if he was saying, The kind of drive-by shooting you're doing and the reason why you're doing it is all right by me.

Then we saw El Divino Maestro.

He said look at everything closely, whatever image strikes you. Look closely, and you will see what you didn't see at first glance. (Click on any image)

"Cuidador del Varrio"

This is "The Dollar Dance"

This is "Cesar Chavez Avenue."

What do you see?

Can you read the varrio, all the old stories, all the new hope? Can you see God in the details? The devil? The face of the dead?

Naw, I'm just playing with you.

We just went there to get a hotdog and a phat fat burrito.

Ajua!

New York City Street Photography: Respecting the Genre

2010-09-17T08:34:00.000-07:00

I suppose in order for photos to be categorized as "Street Photography," there are two necessary elements, the city and the people in it.

Street photography without people may fall into the genre of Landscape Photography or something else.

When I'm shooting in the city, in any city, I tend to take pictures of empty chairs, chairs on sidewalks or next to garbage dumpsters, chairs in shop windows, chairs piled on each other in storage rooms, who knows why?

It's just something I do.

An empty chair seems to carry ghosts with it, especially an old chair, because many people—perhaps some of them now dead--have sat in that seat and some of their energy may still reside there.

But can photos of empty seats really be called Street Photography?

Whenever we put a created image into a genre, we limit the anagogical possibilities of the work.

I'm a Chicano writer, and I’m quite assertive in defending that fact, but I can also acknowledge that being a Chicano writer can put me in a form that may be shaped by those who define and view the category through necessary theoretical and/or socio-political frameworks, and my work may not always be judged on the work itself but on its discourse vis-vis the issues and esthetics of the genre.

So even though the images I accessed in New York last weekend may not all fall into the genre of Street Photography, I didn’t really care. I shot what struck me.

However, on the last blog (see below) I took on a challenge specifically to try New York Street Photography without being too cliché as to where I was or as to the genre itself.

Therefore, in today’s blog I am including only a handful of images that seem to honor the conventions of the genre.

So, here they are:
Please click on the images to make them bigger, and to see the details.

"Bruce and Whoppi"

"The Date"

"Concern"

"Dragon Land"
Notice how all the people in the photo are Asian women. Not a man around.

"Sambuca"

"Break"

"Eyes in the Back of Her Head"

"Bad Kids"

"Dunking"

"No Standing"

"Hey, Daniel!"
These young people yelled and cheered my name as they danced around. I kid you not.

Oops. This photo doesn't have any real person in it, so I guess (get it, guess?) that it doesn't count.

Oh, well, at least there's a chair in it.

New York City Street Photography: The Challenge.

2010-09-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

It must be hard to avoid street photography clichés in places like New City York and Paris, where the pioneers of the genre (which was/is inseparable from documentary photography) have gotten such great images they have become part of our collective memory.

The New York and Paris photos from such people as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau have come to (de facto) define the esthetic of street photography.

In my short time doing drive-by shootings in the city, I have tried Downtown LA, Hollywood, El Paso, and Palm Springs, and it the act of going around these cities snapping shots, it struck me how much I love the genre.

I’m interested in people .

I love to people watch.

I love sitting in some busy part of a city, a café or a plaza, watching.

Maybe I take photos, because I want people to see the beauty I see in the city.
Of course, I’m also interested in other photography genres, but I cannot deny my love for the old images we now know as street photography.

Downtown El Chuco is a fun place to shoot, because there is little tradition of street photography, at least not as much as in New York, so one is less likely to takes shots that are based on images of the city that have come before.

Click on any image to make it larger.

I imagine that a challenge to any photographer would be to take shots of New York while avoiding New York Street photography clichés, not only those that come from the genre, but also those clichés that come from the image of the city itself.

It seems to me that one of the standards of the genre is when an image shows a good-looking model looking down on passing mortals from a giant advertisement, especially if there is a stark contrast to the real person and the person in the ad.

Here’s some I took in Santa Monica and Hollywood. The impulse to snap these shots may have come from the standard of the genre, rather than a powerful attraction to the image itself. I’m not sure.

But this seems to have become such a standard in street photography that it’s almost a cliché, though seemingly not thought as such by most street photographers, who continue to snap variations of this image.

Add the clichés of street photography to the familiar images we have of New York, and it would seem quite a challenge to take, fresh shots in the city, especially in Manhattan.

Still, there are many, and I mean, many fantastic NYC street photographers out there today. Just Google it, and you'll see, but I'm sure they have much more experience than me, still coming out of pop-and-shoot photography, and these serious photographers seem to be able to take original photos.

Well, guess where I’m going?

Sasha has gifted me a weekend in New York, so I could take pictures.

I’m going to bring my Nikon onto the streets of Manhattan, looking for interesting images, but at the same time trying avoid both street photography and New York clichés.

Can I do it?

Wont’ I be tempted to shoot images at ground zero, maybe some sentimental shot of a family looking at a memorial plaque, or an ironic shot of young business men and women in suits, carrying briefcases, walking fast past where the World Trade Center used to be, more focused on their daily accounts than where they are walking?

Would I be tempted to take a shot of Sasha sitting in Central Park on the lawn, with the brownstone high-rise buildings sticking out of the trees on the horizon, an American flag swaying in the wind?

It will surely be a challenge to avoid too-familiar photos, images that could be taken by anyone, and whereas I agree with Pablo Neruda et al that the artistic search for originality is in vain and that everything has been done before and will be done again, I also think that art comes into being when we put our own fresh stamp on archetype.

I’m up for the challenge.

And even of the photos I take, which I will post when I have whittled them down to a few shots, are cliché, so be it.

I’m not really a photographer. I’m a fiction writer. I’m only doing this for fun :)

God is NOT in the detail

2010-08-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

The first time I heard that God is in the details was from the poet Sheryl Luna at a reading she was giving in Chuco.

It struck me as a true statement at the time, and I couldn’t help but think of a quote from Borges wherein he says every detail (in fiction) is an omen.

As writers we write detail, and as happened to all of us--and as should continue to happen until we weave our last sentences--we often re-read something we have written and only then do we notice how much meaning is hidden in the detail, even if we hadn’t intended it.

When I visit colleges and universities where students have read my books in class, they ask me questions about their interpretation of the work, and I am often stunned by how much they have read in the details. Often I am convinced that they discovered something about the work that I had no idea existed.

Did you know, for example, that in my novel and the shadows took him, William might have sexually abused Vero when she was younger?

I had no idea, but that was what some students pointed out to me, and they had the detail to prove it.

Our favorite writers write with such divine detail, things like “nadie vio la luna que sangraba en mi boca," (Neruda) or, “when you open your mouth, a ball of yellow light falls to the floor." (Ai)

When I heard Sheryl Luna say “God is in the detail,” I believed it because of the various layers of meaning that are often uncovered in closely examining a poem or a story.

She attributed the quote to another poet, whose name I forget, but I have come to learn that it is often attributed to the last person that said it. My students think I invited it.

Recently I was shocked to find that one of my colleagues was the first one to coin the phrase.

A student wrote a paper in my class that opened with the phrase, “God is in the detail,” an epitaph at the top of the page, and he wrote the name of the originator, Lex Williford, my colleague and a professor the student had a semester before me.

The phrase is attributed to many sources, click here, and we have even given it variations like, the devil is in the detail. The meaning is in the detail. The truth is in the detail. The kitchen sink is in the detail, as if the sum of all these things is God.

But I believe that God is NOT in the detail.

I’m going to explain why in a bit, but first let me say that the concept is true enough if the definition of God were “meaning” or the effect a work has on an observer. Details allow a reader to feel something, to connect as it were, and the closer we examine a passage, the deeper we can go into the fictional landscape.

One of my favorite fiction details, which I have tried unsuccessfully to steal many times, comes from Benard Malamud’s The Tenants.

“He put on his cold pants.”

Cold pants?

I love it.

I feel the cold fabric rising up my legs. I feel the stiff denim material.

That one detail says so much to me, and it also deepens my understanding of the character and the overall meaning of that very cold novel.

Another detail I like comes from Tristan Tzara's Le couer à gaz, and I think I successfully stole it at least once, a detail in Unending Rooms. The line goes “Il n’y a pas d’humanité. Il n’y a que rèverbère et des chien.”

This is from memory, so if my French grammar is off, know that the sentido of the phrase is what matters, There is no humanity. There are only streetlamps and dogs.

I love the desolate image this line leaves with me, how urban , how gray and unfriendly.

So many things lie in the details.

The same is true for photography.

Sometimes one can shoot an image without knowing why, for whatever reason the image strikes them, and only after seeing the image later does the photographer even notice the detail.

Last week, in downtown LA, somewhere in the garment district, I took this shot.

Only later did I see this.

Only later did I notice how much it looked like adoring ladies surrounding la virgencita.

As much as I didn't want to spend much money in Arizona on my drive back, in protest for their anti-Mexican policies, I had to stop for gas. I pulled into a creepy station. A border patrol agent was parked on a hill, looking over the freeway and the gas station.

The image of the place struck me, so I shot and I got this.

It wasn't until later, when I looked at the detail that I saw this.

I think he's one of those law-abiding citizens, looking for illegals. No wonder I felt such an interesting energy of the place and was compelled to take this photo.

But God is not in the detail.

If we think of God as pure energy, to use a concept from mysticism (everyone from William Blake to those law of attraction people), than God has no form, no shape. God is before form.

Blake says all religions are the same, by which he obviously means that the energy behind the metaphorical system, the myths and images that make up the various religious narratives, is the same energy. God is that energy. “Energy is eternal delight.” Energy is God.

Physicists call the missing elementary particle, that which makes up all things, the God particle, yet the moment they try to give it an equation, is the moment God becomes a metaphor and is therefore restricted to a singular meaning.

Even their system cannot restrict God.

A pre-anthropomorphized God has no gender.

I love how the first reference to God in the book of Genesis is Elohim, a Hebrew word with a plural ending, so that a literal translation cannot simply be “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” but Gods (not “the gods,” because there is no use in this case of the Hebrew word for “the,” which is “ha”, the letter he with a vowel mark, before the word “Elohim" ) but Gods, “they”, which is not to say in a polytheistic way that there are many gods, but rather to say that when we assigns a single pronoun to God, we assign an image, we singularize, and thus we limit God.

God cannot be made in our image without taking away some of God’s energy.

Kabbalah sometimes refers to God as the no-thing. God is not a thing, rather God is the energy that gives life to all things. God is beyond all things.

God is not in the detail. God's tracks are in the detail.

The details, like all things, are part of the One, part of the unified whole, and in that sense the details contains divinity, like all of us do, like every one of our fingers, like every one of the hairs on our head.

But a single strand of hair on my head which rises up above the others because of some static electrical phenomenon is not God.

We are artists, created in God’s image, and our impulse to create is a reflection of the divinity within us.

When we write a poem, our energy or reason for writing, that which compelled us to sit for hours to create the most meaningful work we are capable of, that is God. That impulse does not contain theme, it does not contain meaning. The form of the work does, which is to say the sum of the details within a work.

Rather the impulse is our energy, our will to live, which is a will to create.
God is not in the details. Our ideas are in the details, our ability to give form to our creations.

God is beyond and behind the details--

Street Photography: Walk-by shooting

2010-08-09T14:39:00.000-07:00

I was walking in a city not my own, and I saw this.

Then I saw this.

Then I left.

And this was seen. . .

or not seen by anyone.

If no one's there to observe, who can give an image a form?

El Paso Street Photography: How photos may rob our souls.

2010-07-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

Sasha and I decided to stay in El Paso for the summer, here on the writer’s block.

We had never done this before, at least not the entire summer, and we soon found that anyone who says there’s nothing to do in El Paso hasn’t been paying attention.

There’s so much going on during the summer we sometimes have to decide among festivals, concerts, offbeat church bazaars, craft markets.

At home Sasha started a garden on the balcony of our second story apartment.

She grows squash and basil and so many tomatoes we can't eat them all.

While Sasha grows vegetables, I have been taking pictures, hundreds of them, which is easy to do with digital photography.

I find I'm attracted to what I guess is called Street photography, random shots of city life.

Here's some shots I took at the Texas Tattoo Showdown.

You can click on any image to make it bigger.

A beautiful El Paso family.

But I also like driving east of the city on Montana with my friend Moses, where we take pictures of stuff, whatever strikes us, for whatever reason.

"Y"

I like photos of people, especially when the image seems to capture something about the person.

"Cigarette and Lollipop."

"Yes, My butt!"

We have all heard the movie cliche wherein a native from Africa or South America doesn't want their photos taken, because they feel it steals their souls, and although the idea is supposed to make so-called advanced peoples scoff at native beliefs, there might be some truth to the idea.

Maybe not so much for the person in the photo, but for the photographer.

Photographers take photos for the same reason poets write poetry.

We can articulate many reasons one strives to capture an image, and one of those reasons is to say that the desire to create, the creative impulse to snap each shot or to write a poem or even to bake bread or grow vegetables in your own garden is the same impulse that connects us with the divinity, with the Creator.
We are co-creators, created in God's image. We are created to be creators, even when it comes to reality.

Matter, we know,is empty space, and it requires our consciousness to see what's there, to call a thing a thing.

Maybe if we take photos but they are trapped, stored, hoarded in the nano world, they are not able to release what energy created them, our divinity, the higher part of our souls, so a part of our spirits are trapped in storage too.

Yes, it’s good photographic sense to shoot as many pictures as possible, and as writers (that is, artists), we create and uncover imagery, but it may not be healthy on any level to collect too many of them.

It’s not like in the old days when a photo album, even several of them, contained the images that would become important in our lives.

When I was a kid, my father was a serious amateur photographer, and he took pictures with expensive cameras, which had 24 or so exposures to each roll of film, and he developed them in the darkroom he built in our garage.

I remember the smell of the chemicals, and how he hung the dripping photo paper on twine with metal clamps, and we would watch the white face of paper slowly turn into a recognizable image, my mother posing in a dress under a tree, me and my brother holding toy guns and shooting at the camera.

Millions of people keep images in their cameras, their computers, their phones, their ipods, millions and millions of images out there, and although each person that stores them might like to believe that someday they or their heirs might go through the storage disks and view each and every photo and extract some important ones, there are far too many images suffering eternal darkness for anyone to have the time to go through and evaluate each one.

Maybe it’s best to delete the majority of the photos we take, not only for our soul's sake (I'm still not sure how I feel about that idea), but also because throwing away hundreds of images causes us to value the ones that we do keep.

We tend to collect so many things in our homes that we don't value what we have, we lament what we don't have. We store stuff in boxes, in garages and attics, and some of us have so much stuff we pay extra money each month to keep the things in storage spaces.

Coming from such a generation, our temptation to collect images makes sense.

But I don’t want to be a collector of images.

And although it’s hard to decide what to give up, it seems like a good discipline to let go of things, in this case, to literally let go of images.

It's a good way to practice detachment.

This photo hobby is quite recent for me, so I'm thinking about all this stuff as I go out and take pictures.

But I seem to be evolving two criteria by which I'll save a photo.

One: I review the photos I take the same way I walk through a museum.

I walk through pretty quickly , feeling no obligation to stand before paintings for any reason other than they strike me, and I want to get a longer, closer look at the work.

When I walked through the MoMA in New York, I spent a lot of time standing before Motherwell’s Elegy, mesmerized by the energy pulsing from the black trinity of oval shapes.

Images that didn’t strike me I let blur by.

When I’m viewing the pictures I have taken, I go through them quickly, but if one grabs my attention I stop and look at it.

That’s a finalist.

"El Tweety Tambien"

The second way I decide which ones to keep is if a title for the image comes easy, or to put it another, perhaps crazier way, if a voice says something to me.

This one for example.

When I saw it I thought “Mi Familia Por vida," which is what the tattoo says on the guy's head.

"Kafka"

Here’s a cheesy photo-shopped version, getting rid of the noise in the background and replacing it with an even more cheesy background.

Is “photo-shop” a verb?

One says a picture was or is photo-shopped, yes?

Even when another program is used? It’s like saying give me a Band aid or a Coke, when we mean a plaster or a cola.

I’m still not sure where I stand on the seeming controversy among photographers about the value of photo-shopping. Some seem to believe that a photo should appear as it was taken, because to photo-shop it means you can make a great image out of anything.

I’m not sure if I agree, maybe because to me the process of editing photos has always been a part of what I know as photography, but I don’t disagree either. I have yet to take a position. Maybe I never will, but will admire both and practice both approach.

I wonder how poets would feel about running every poem they have written through an advanced computer program that identifies and intensifies metaphors and rhythmic linguistic patterns?

If it could improve the poem, would it lessen its value?

"The Shadows"

Okay, that's already several photos I've saved from our summer in El Paso thus far.

There's still a bit over a month to go before classes start at UTEP.

If I believe what I say above, all that pontificating pomp about detachment, I better delete the rest.

I'm glad we decided to stay in the city for the summer.

Kafka and Joey seem pretty happy about it.

You can see these and a few more by clicking here.

Ay te watcho!

From Chuco

¡Ajúa!

Pellegrino's Top Fifty My Ass!

2010-04-28T15:41:00.000-07:00

S. Pellegrino's annual "World's 50 Best Restaurants" list was released on Monday, and let me tell you, I’m more than a little upset about the greasy spoons they chose to acknowledge.

Most of the restaurants are in Fifi places like New York, Paris, London, but not a single restaurant on the list is located in what many Chicanos like me consider the culinary capital of the world, El Paso, TX.

En serio. Not a single El Paso eatery made their pinche list.

Check it out if you don’t believe me. Click this then.

El Chuco, Texas has in-doobid-lee some of the best culinary establishments in the world.

We have for example, Lucy’s at the King’s X, which is reported to be the place where Machaca was invented. ¡Ay! the way they smother it in American cheese sauce should have teased the taste buds of at least one of these pendejo judges of fine food.

And what about Carnitas Queretaro? Have they tried their pozole?

click on this then!

Ask them judges if they ate here. I bet they haven’t.

And the Good Luck café on Alameda?

That place is open all night long, so after the bars close and you want a little menudo or beans fried in lard to sober you up, you can go there.

Have even one of these so-called judges of good taste enjoyed one of their Lucky Burgers. Damn, they’re the best!

They’re served with two hamburger patties, bacon, ham, a weenie and a slab of spam and three slices of cheese.

(I found this picture online, and it don't even come close to the Lucky Burger. This is what you eat while you're waiting for your Lucky Burger.)

And the burger comes with a pile of French fries, which are fired so long in grease that they go wet and limp in your fingers, and if you don’t wash down each bite with horchata, the fat congeals on your tongue.

Sure, Paris may have their Chateaubriand, but El Paso has what is perhaps the world’s number one eating spot, La Pachanga Tortas. Now I admit, not a lot of people know about this place.

It’s downtown, only open for lunch, and they only have four tables. Isn’t that a sign of class?

Hey, you Pellegrino pendejos! Did you even try this place? Did you ever give this pig a chance?

The ham torta! Oh, man, ¡deliciosa!

Their Cubana is fat and juicy, and if you’re an insider, you know to slip the owner a little extra, and she’ll put together una Torta de colita.

How could these Pellegrino’s pendejos miss the places we Chicanos love so much?

The only conclusion I can make is that the judges are racist.

Sure, El Paso is nothing but a sprawling metropolis (including Ciudad Júarez) in the Chicanada. We are not powerful people, at least not the butt-load of us, but we are poor and afraid of what the day can bring to our cities. We are addicted to hope and despair in equal doses.

But ask anyone, Mexicanos know how to eat.

Like Burciaga suggested in a cartoon, if some UFOs were to land on earth, those little green people with antennas sticking out of their heads wouldn’t say to the first human they see, “Earthing, take me to your leader.” Oh, no.

They’d say, “Do you know where I can find some good Mexican food?”

We El Chuco Chicanos, I must proudly say, are some of the fattest people in the world with some of the highest rates of diabetes. I’m a type two. And I am, gulp, a little fat maybe. Here I am at the Andres Montoya homenaje with poets Lee Herrick, Oscar Bermeo, Craig Santos Perez, and Javier Huerta, and no offense to my homies, but I must be más Chicano de todos 'cuz look at my stomach!

Why are we big?

You think it's because we don’t get any exercise?

Hell no it ain't!

We can’t afford cars, so we walk everywhere, to our job in the early morning, to our job in the afternoon, to our night job on the graveyard shift. We walk to Wal-mart and then carry all that shit home by ourselves. We know what work is.

We clean houses, wash cars, scrub toilets, work on rooftops, we clean the grease from drains and we haul garbage bags down three flights of stairs in 100 degree heat and with a hangover. We can do anything with our bodies if we get paid for it.

We can pull giant palm trees from the ground, load them up on a truck and replant them in front of some rich man’s home.

We’re not overweight because we're lazy and lack exercise, we’re fat because we know how to eat!
Okay, maybe I'm a little lazy at times.

The heck with the Pellegrino pendejos (PPs), you don’t have to go to Europe or Manhattan to get great eats.

You can start right here in Aztlán with a chile relleno burrito from Ciros. And they’re so damn cheap you can get two.

Albeit, one of the resultants they listed as the top fifty in the world is in Mexico City, but it’s called Biko (Mexicans don’t even have a “k”) and how many Mexicans do you think can afford to eat there?

It’s located in the Palanco neighborhood, and the menus are in English.

Need I say more?

Let’s protest this racists decision by PPs.

Let’s all meet tonight at La Malinche’s downtown for a bowl of caldo and some enchiladas montadas.

¡Ajúa! from the Writer’s Block!

Wormholes

2010-04-01T09:01:00.000-07:00

The image is a wormhole.

When we stop to look at something that strikes us, it can bring us out of our bodies and transport us to an alternate space-time. Images cuase our imaginations to lead us into another reality, or at the very least, they gave us a glimpse.

This a wormhole.

And so is this.

In fact, any image can be a wormhole at anytime.

If your imagination allows it.

The key to traveling the multi-verse is the imagination evoked through imagery.

We encounter a chair, and we see a chair, but if we look at it a certain way can we also see a face in the chair?

Can we look at an ordinary wall and see how the fact of my brain creating symmetry as I receive the image allows my memory, my imagination, my neural mapping to create something beyond the veil, that is something within the image that takes me out of my body and places me in another world?

Can I see a face?

I see dead people!

Doors and windows are two of the most common wormholes.

They are basic archetypes.

The fact may be that most writers who are able to travel to other universes rarely go beyond the world of the dead, because most of our relationship to striking images has to do with our attraction to archetype.

And in the world of the dead everything is archetypal, a skeleton key, a black cat sitting in a window, a tree on a misty hill.

In the city of the dead everything is archetype, and not much else, and that may encourage cliche. I found this image on the web. I think it's from a video game.

But we can experience images wherein the archetype is just one of its qualities or wherein we know there is archetype but we cannot define it (we just feel it). Some images are so far beyond our ordinary understanding that in order to "get" them we have to take a leap of faith and allow our imaginations to create something from the clues on the page.

For example this line from Lorca:

Por mi sombra están las ranas
privadas de las estrellas

I’m not entirely sure what he’s talking about, but I can create an image of frogs in the stars. It’s not an ordinary archetype, it’s something seemingly new, so it causes my imagination to go to somewhere new.

Look at this image from Rita Dove,

The door opens to a street like in the movies,
clean of people, of cats

The more we can see an image in different ways, the more our neural network can bust out loco.

We can access another universe.

Whatever you can imagine actually exists somewhere in the multi-verse.

Some physicists tell us that every time a particle appears in space and can be observed, multiple possibilities of where that particle could have appeared exist as well. They are shadow particles, and for every particle there are an infinite number of shadow particles, far too many to count, more than 100 to the hundreth power. And there are so many particles in ordinary matter that even they cannot be counted.

The math tells us that there are so many universes that it would be impossible for us to imagine something that cannot exist.

Physicists also tell us that it is impossible to travel from universe to universe or even back and forth through time, but I say we can, through images, sounds, and colors, to name a few ordinary wormholes.

Suppose subatomic wormholes existed but they are so small that mass cannot enter into the event horizon and be spit out into another reality?

Matter cannot travel from universe to universe or through non liner time, but the imagination clearly can.

When we see an image that strikes us, we see a reality in our imaginations. Maybe we are looking at Van Gogh’s peasants sleeping under the sun and we picture ourselves there there too, chewing on a straw of hay we pulled from a haystack.

What we are picturing is a possibility.

It’s a glimpse beyond the veil.

I cannot explain the physics (because I’m not a physicist) I can only say that intense feelings—even when invoked by an image—are chemical releases in the brain, and because chemicals are made of matter they are also made of elementary particles that make up matter, like nucleons and quarks.

According to the standard model there may even be a mass-less particle called the Higgs boson, the God Particle, and because this particle is without mass it might be able to travel through subatomic wormholes.

Matter at any rate is energy, and part of the energy of our imagination--an intense chemical release in the brain—can transport our thoughts and our ability to see into another reality, maybe a world where people are turning into rhinoceros or where non human animals can speak.

I once walked through an airport and saw a distinguished older man dressed in a silk Italian suit.

He had gray hair and was tall and thin, and he reminded me of pictures I had seen of Mark Strand.

Suddenly I thought of a world where everyone was Mark Strand, and I pictured all the people in the airport becoming Mark Strand. Mothers walking with children, teenagers listening to mp3s, they were all Mark Strand.

I felt myself becoming Mark Strand.

There may be so many universes, a number too large to imagine, googles and googles of universes, that our imaginations could never conceive of all the possibilities. In at least one universe (maybe millions of them) everyone could very well be Mark Strand.

When we create landscapes in fiction and poetry we are creating an infinite amount of wormholes, not by our intended landscape—that is, not the universe intended by the laws of our narrative—but through images a reader might find in our landscape.
Imagine a reader lowers herself into a fictional world, using the words on the page as a rope so she can climb down in there to the world of fiction, say, for example, she finds herself on a city street.

The reader (could her name be Lumilla?) walks around the city, and even though the narrative motion and velocity indicates where the reader should look and how fast she should travel the streets, the reader can choose to stop walking at any time.

She can look closely at any detail.

She can feel something that was not intended by the writer and that transports her into a universe in her memory (the past) or in her imagination. Each image in the fictional landscape can be closely looked at.

What kind of fiction and poetry do we want to write?

John Gardner calls the experience of entering a fictional landscape the vivid and continuous dream.

The vivid and continuous dream is when we are reading and we are so engrossed in the action that we forget we’re reading and language disappears and a movie plays in our head.

Obviously we may not always want language to disappear, we may sometimes want the play and movement of the language to create a non-material landscape, a reality in itself, but the fact remains that writers should be capable of creating a landscape that is not too superficial. We should be able to create landscapes within which a reader can enter and look around.

We want landscapes that can be entered not only once, but twice, three times a hundred times.

We want to create landscapes wherein the reader can enter into over and over again and find something new each time, some new connection, some new meaning, some new universe that was hidden the first time they read the work.

We (writers) can both suggest those meanings (for example on the sidewalk on a street corner there could be twelve math sticks, all of them burnt, and one cigarette butt) or we can have no intentions other than to give verisimilitude to our settings (a stop light flashing red), but the detail can be used to deepen the experience of the reader.

For example, we create a chair near a window, and on the chair we place reading glasses and a book called Bankruptcy and You.

The image creates back story, because the reader imagines the person who was sitting on the chair reading, and we imagine that things may not be going well for them financially speaking.

If we put an empty whiskey bottle next to the chair, we encourage the imagination of the reader in another direction.

Obviously what we would be creating with the chair would exist on the narrative level and may help push the story forward, but they will not be as complex as images not intended to create story.

Can you create an angel?

Other than narrative fact, the reader is just as much a creator of the esthetic phenomenon as the writer, and a reader can deepen the levels of meaning so much that the writer figures out what he or she has created through the reader’s response.

Sometimes college students are assigned to read my novel, and sometimes I visit their campus for a reading. They often tell me things about my characters that I had no idea about, but they seem right.

For example, in and the shadows took him students at Modesto Junior College wrote papers on how the sister Vero was sexually abused by her father. I had never intended such a thing but the details they pointed out as proof, the way she wears her big t-shirts, how she holds her hands, convinced me.

Obviously we can enter and reenter Kafka’s great works and find something new each time. Kafka is made greater by the generations, and he is certainly more brilliant now than when he was alive having trouble getting published.

Every time we enter his landscape we see some detail we had missed before, maybe the checkered tile in Gregor’s room,

and that descending geometry coming towards us as we peek into the room might cause us to remember Escher, or a memory, but we can stop and look at that pattern and it can lead us to other patterns.

We can see Escher.

He’s looking at that pattern as well, and because Kafka’s world is so unusual yet logical the patterns in the floor begin to shift and move around until we cannot tell which squares are on the floor and which are giving shape to the room itself.

When we enter Gregor’s room we see not only the details, but we also see others observing closely the same details. We can have conversations with Borges, because he’s in Gregor’s room as well, maybe looking at the apple rotting in the flesh of the bug.

Borges says that in fiction every detail is an omen.

What is an omen but a glimpse into the future from the present?

Details in our work are not just that, but they can allow us to travel back in time as well, not only fictional time but time in our own memories, or we can imagine things and end up somewhere the story never intended

This is why we never write “a room.”

We have a cold room with a telephone on a table.

This, of course, is nothing new to you.

Tukaram in the 17th century writes,

A good poem is like finding a hole
in the palace wall

Never know what you might see.

Two Deadly Spiders

2010-03-09T08:39:00.000-08:00

A certain blind sat at his table before a bowl of wonton soup. It was still steaming, and he leaned over the bowl, vapors rising to his nose. He held a pair of chopsticks in his right hand, clicking them together with anticipation.

He was very poor. His room was small with no windows, and he slept on a matt. Stacks of books and scrolls, which he could no longer read, surrounded the wobbly table where the old man sat.

He didn’t notice that hanging off the ceiling above him was a deadly spider, the legs thick and hairy. It almost seemed as if the spider was looking down into the bowl of soup. It was said that one bite of that kind of spider would cause the victim to suffer immense pain for two days, until finally their bodies would give up and they would die.

The landlady usually cleaned the old man’s room to make sure it was safe from these deadly spiders, but the room hadn’t been dusted and the cobwebs hadn’t been removed in several weeks, because the lady’s sick brother was staying with her, an alcoholic near death, who moaned day and night for more drink and the names of different women.

She still brought the blind man his meals, but taking care of her brother, she sometimes forgot, and today this bowl of wanton soup was all she had brought him in three days. He was very hungry.

He took his chopsticks and picked up something from the bowl, squeezed it a bit to test its density, and he knew it was some deep green leaves of bok choy. He lifted the leaves dripping with broth to his mouth, blew on them and ate them. They were delicious.

He mindfully put down the chopsticks, knowing exactly where he had left them, and he picked up the bowl and drank some of the hot broth. He set down the bowl, reached for his chop sticks, and at that very moment, the deadly spider on the ceiling lost his grasp of the wooden beam and fell down from the ceiling, floating down like a feather all the way into the bowl. He splashed down at the same time the blind man put his chopsticks into the broth and felt around for a wonton.

The spider, stunned from the heat of the soup, suddenly tried to swim for life to the edge of the bowl, but the chopsticks came after him like giant claws in a Japanese monster movie, and the sticks picked him up by his fat body, his legs desperately trying to break free.

The old man lightly squeezed the chopsticks to test the density of the wonton, which caused great pain for the spider, and it didn’t feel right or normal to the man. He figured it was a new kind of wonton, maybe a bit overcooked, but he was hungry.
He brought the spider to his mouth to eat it. The spider fought to free himself from the sticks, his legs going wildly, and at the moment the old man brought the deadly spider to his lips—one of the legs slightly brushing his nose—the landlady knocked on his door.

“Are you listening to me?” she said. “I’m afraid this is going to be your last meal.

My dear brother needs the room. He’s not going to get better and even though he spent his life drinking and all the bad stuff that comes with it, he’s still my brother.”

The old man put the chopsticks back in the bowl, and the spider, relieved for a second chance at life, ran fast over the mounds of vegetables and wontons to escape from the bowl.

The old man knew nothing was certain but the fact of food, so he picked up the chopsticks again, determined to enjoy his last meal in the room he had lived in for seven years.

He plunged the chopsticks to the very bottom of the bowl, and he picked up and bunch of noodles and pulled them out of the broth. They rose from the bottom of the bowl like a mountain growing from the water, a magic mountain, and the spider, still trying to fight its way out of the bowl, rose up on the snakey terrain of the noodles, all his legs trying to grasp solid ground.

The old man brought a bunch of noodles to his mouth, and the rest of them hung down all the way back into the bowl and soup, and the spider climbed up the noodles toward the old man’s chopsticks. The man bit into the gathering of noodles, sucking a slimy swirl of them into his mouth, releasing the bunch with his lips and teeth, until they fell back into the bowl, along with the spider, who splashed on his back into the broth. His frantic legs twittered.

Just then a second deadly spider, the same kind as the first, crawled down from a wall, across the floor, up and down a stack of books, and up the legs of the table, onto the surface. He walked toward the bowl, as if drawn by the smell.
The old man loved the taste of the noodles, so salty, so delicious, so hot, and he mindfully put the chopsticks down on the table, lifted the soup bowl and brought it to his mouth to drink. The spider inside the bowl tried to swim up to the other rim so as not to end up in the old man’s open mouth. The little creature had to use the man’s teeth to push off from with three legs, and he swam up the bowl.

Meanwhile, the other spider stepped onto the pair of chopsticks, and before he was even half way across them, the chopsticks rose from the table into the air like beams on a high-rise construction sight, and the spider held on. The old man wanted a wonton, so he took the chopsticks and put them into the bowl, and the second spider, not wanting to plunge to his death, crawled up the chopsticks, ready to bite the old man’s fingers for relief, one of his legs touching the hair on the old man’s knuckle.

But right when the spider’s sharp, venomous teeth reached the old man’s hand, the chopsticks plunged a second time into the bowl and the spider slid down the slick wood. The old man grabbed a wonton in his chopsticks, or so he thought.
It was, of course, the first spider, caught in the pincers of the sticks, while the other spider was right above him on the sticks, hanging on for life. The old man lifted the sticks and brought them slowly, mindfully, to his mouth. He blew on it, the hair of both spiders waving like grass in the wind.

Right before he got the supposed wonton in his mouth-- the spiders ready to bite his flesh --the landlady knocked again, loud, angry.

“You hurry up with that soup and go,” she said. “I’m sorry, but he needs the bed!”

The old man put the chopsticks back into the bowl, and both of the deadly spiders took the chance to crawl out of the soup and up the side of the dish, where they rested on the rim like two friends taking refuge on the edge of a rescue boat.

The old man held his hands together and prayed for forgiveness, because he had been so divided in his heart that he was ignoring the gift of food, and even if he did have to find place to live, right now he had delicious, hot soup.

He picked up the chopsticks, plunged them into the bowl and picked up a wonton.

The spiders watched from the rim of the bowl. The old man blew on the wonton, and put it into his mouth.

It was so juicy, shrimp, pork, so delicious, so wet.

He ate the rest of the soup, all the wontons, all the leafy green bok choy, all the noodles, and the two spiders watched him from the rim like proud parents. When he was done eating, he sat back in his chair, held his stomach and let out a satisfied burp.

Note: I got the idea for this story while I was eating a bowl of wonton soup in the San Francisco Airport. I was on my way from Modesto to San Diego. I had been on the road for Undending Rooms over two weeks, and I was very tired. I hadn’t slept more than a few hours in the last few days. That morning I had to catch a small plane at five a.m. from Modesto, and while waiting for my transfer in San Francisco, I decided to have some breakfast. The San Francisco airport is the best in the US, for its Asian food.

I purchased a bowl of wonton soup. As I ate, I tried to read a book called 101 Zen Tales. I was trying to eat a steamy leaf of bok choy and hold the book at the same time, and the hot broth dripped off of the leaves and onto my hand and wrist and chin, and it burned.

My internal voice kept yelling, Shit! Damn!

I wasn’t being very mindful.

I was being impatient.

I was taking the gift of food and cursing it.

I put down the book and ate my wonton soup. It was delicious.

Still, as mindfully as the experience might have been, I couldn’t help but think about how much I liked the soup, how simply by putting down the book and concentrating solely on the food in front of me, I could enjoy it on an entirely different level. Every spoonful was a gift.

It made that bowl of soup the best gift I could ever receive. I become one with the soup. :)

And being a writer, I couldn’t help but think, I should write about this experience.

Then the first line of the story shot into my head like an arrow: "A certain blind sat at his table before a bowl of wonton soup."

Obviously, the language of the story was influenced by the koans I was reading at the time. Would I otherwise write a line like, "He was very poor."?

As I followed the language into the story, I was surprised by the second deadly spider, but I'm more than willing to let the language of a story determine the meaning.

I'm working on a new set of stories, and this story may very well make it into the collection.

For this post, I added some pictures I found on the web.

The spiders pictured may not be accurate representations of what spiders look like in the blind man’s corner of the earth, but he can’t see them anyway.:)

Is that so? Juxtaposing Images

2010-03-04T09:07:00.000-08:00

In our recent stay in Buenos Aires, I was struck by a few images.

When you put two random images together, side by side, they seem to take on a singular form, as if the juxtaposition creates the effect.

Is that so?

So be it.

This is a phrase I identify with living Zen:

Is that so?

I got this from a koan about a priest who is accused by a young woman of getting her pregnant.

When her parents confront him with what they think he did, he doesn’t deny it or admit it. He says, Is that so?

He loses his reputation, everybody despises him, c alls him a pervert, spits on him, and years later, after living in the streets as a beggar, the girl confesses that it wasn’t the priest, but a boy she was in love with.

The people come to the priest to tell him that they are sorry for treating him so badly. They tell him that they found out the truth.

Is that so? he asks.

The point of this koan --(or one of the points, because there are as many points to a story as there are people to read them)-- is the idea that if one wants to move toward enlightenment, one must receive all things as equal, praise as well as disdain.

This idea of everything being equal can take on many meanings, depending on the perspective. It can mean, for example, to trust God (the universe, life, goodness, or any of the other seventy plus names for the ein sof).

I find “Is that so?” to be similar in many ways to the Judeo Christian tradition of saying “Amen,” which means, So be it.

Is that so?

So be it.

This is the only organizing principle for these juxtapositions.

Is that so?

So be it.

I put them together careful not to make a statement or try to express a meaning.

Obviously I will make unconscious cultural and intellectual choices when I juxtapose any two images, but I’m not trying to say anything. Also obvious is that I will make choices based on symmetry, color, lighting, etc.

Perhaps that is more of a factor in how images choose each other.

A few times, when I tried to put an image with another, it resisted, until I found its partner.

But the meaning is in the juxtaposition itself, and the connections a viewer makes will be their creation, their statement on reality.

The meaning is in the thing itself.

Is that so?

So be it.

##################################################################

Is that so?

So be it.

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writer's block intersection

2010-02-09T19:30:00.000-08:00

Before I get to part two of the Writer's Block, let me say....

This is what we see from our balconies and sidewalks.

And this.

This is the Escher House.

On the Writer's Block there are at least five serious writers.

Sasha is one of them.

She just had her first reading for her first book, at Fresno State.

It was nice that Phil and Frannie showed up, but it made her hecka (to use a Fresno word) nervous.

She was great.

She went on after Medrano, pictured here preparing his set.

A lot of our family showed up.

Here is, from left to right, like you would read a line from a poem, Tina, Renee, my auntie Cookie, Erin, Tim, Cruz, and Freddy. Then there is Nicole, Sandy, Corina, and in the front Ezekiel.

She signed a lot of books.

Our aunt Cookie, or Ruth, or Cuka , was very proud of Sasha.

This is our brother.

This is a cool MFA candidate, a Chicana from Inglewood, Los.

These are three writers.

One of them lives on the Writer's block.

Speaking of the Writer's Block, part two anyone?

The Writer's Block

2010-01-29T07:48:00.000-08:00

Part One of Two Parts

Kafka has his own social life.

He’ll sit at the door to the balcony and stare at us, until one of us lets him out.

We have a wrap-around balcony right above an intersection in Sunset Heights. It has 180 degree view, views of the mountains, rooftops, and on the other side we can see a sea of lights that is Ciudad Juárez.

We are practically underneath the El Paso Star, the city’s postcard identity, a lit up Texas star on the side of the biggest mountain.

Kafka’ll sit on the corner of the balcony looking down on the intersection. Directly across from us is a three-story mansion now converted into many rooms, un-air conditioned apartments where poor people live, mostly older women without families.
He stares off at that house or onto the intersection at people walking by, homeless guys looking for spare change, college students parking in front of our building and running late to class. He doesn’t bark at anyone, he hardly ever barks, but occasionally one of the old women coming out of the old mansion will for some reason cause him to tense up, and he’ll bark at her as she slowly crosses the street toward our building.

We don’t know his criteria for barking at someone, but he must have his reasons. A cholo walking by with a bulldog in a spike collar, or two homeless men following a student asking him for money, will not capture Kafka’s attention, but if one of the old ladies comes out of the Escher house, he barks like crazy. Maybe he’s communicating to them, or sensing their energy.

We call it the Escher house because it’s an optical illusion, a strange loop. It has been cut up by the owner into so many different parts, with so many doors and walkways and staircases leading this way and that, going up and down that it seems illogical. Through windows and doors we can glimpse inside and see the old ladies walking downstairs and upstairs and past windows, and before we know it two or more of them walk out of the same door out of the side of the house or the front of the house or both, or the one we see walking up the stairs ends up in the street, while the one walking down the stairs ends up somewhere inside the house. That’s not the only thing strange about it. As I said, there must be about 22 people living there, and during the day you see them go in and out, up and down the stairs, and you might even see one of them standing in his window looking out at the grey sheet of Ciudad Juarez, but at night, all the lights in the Escher house are out.

It stands pitch black on a hill on the corner, as if no one lived there. No one seems to use lights. During the day there is a man who puts two kitchen chairs in the front of the house, under some bushes and sits there, sometimes with an old lady who lives in the building, sometimes alone. This man is huge, like Frankenstein, and he’s bald and walks bent over as if his massive upper body was too heavy to support. He sits out there all day, watching the neighborhood as people come in and out of the house.
Sometimes three Jehovah Witnesses will walk up the cement stairs that lead to the grand entrance of the former mansion, and they go in. They must go to all the numbered doors inside the house, and they might come back out an hour later.

I can imagine, when it was a single house, that it must have been beautiful. A rich family must have lived there.
Maybe there used to be a beautiful foyer lined by art.

Kakfa can stay out on the balcony for hours watching the house. Sasha and I could be lying in bed watching a movie, and we’ll try to get Kafka to come joins us, but sometimes he doesn’t feel like it. He wants to be alone. Not all the time, sometimes all he wants is to play or to cuddle with us, but sometimes he prefers to be alone.

This makes sense if you consider two things.
One, we create dogs in our own image. We often hear people comment on how much dogs look like their owners.

Here's an exaggerated image I found on the internet:

I remember having lunch outdoors at the World Café in Venice, California. Sitting a few tables away from us was the famous baseball player/heartthrob Jose Conseco. He wore a silky sweat suit and gold jewelry, and like us he was sitting at the rail, so he could have his dog on a leash on the sidewalk, like I had Felix, my old dog, on his leash. The waiters at that café are very nice to dogs, often bringing them bowls of water, but they simply gushed over Conseco’s dog.

Felix was part German Sheppard and part black lab, a loyal and smart dog, but not flashy.

Conseco’s dog was some exotic breed I had never seen in real life, with such thin and shiny hair it looked like an expensive fur coat.

I don’t remember the breed, all I remember is that the dog had tall legs like a show dog. People passed by and stopped at his dog, who was sitting like royalty next to the table. They asked if they could pet him and Conseco nodded yes. He was eating lunch with his kids.

After having doted so long on the Conseco dog, some people would pass by Felix, and very few of them stopped to pet him, and no one took his picture.
After lunch Conseco stood up like a movie god, tall, built, gleaming with silk and gold.

He and his dog walked down the Venice boardwalk, a sea of people moving out of his way so they could pass, and he was trailed by his kids. People took pictures. Later that day we saw him get into his white Cadillac Escalade, gold plated bumpers and rims, and people took pictures of him driving out of the parking lot. He seemed to enjoy the attention.

Dogs look like their owners for obvious reasons. Owners choose dogs in their own image. When they choose a dog, they choose what they see or want to see about themselves, or what they refuse to acknowledge about themselves.

The other reason dogs look like their owners is their personality. A dog’s individual personality has very little to do with the dog, that is, the dog’s biological system. Personality comes from species then breed. Almost all other personality traits that are individual to the dog come from the owner. If the owner is always nervous, afraid of everything, the dog will hide behind furniture when he hears lighting. If the owner is mean, hates people, hates his neighbors, the dog will bark meanly when anyone approaches. If the owner is always depressed, the dog will be morose. We create dogs, unconsciously or not, in our own image.

I once met a dog who refused to receive affection from anyone but his owner. If you tried to touch him, he would bite you, but he loved being held by his owner, and when she was sitting down, the dog had to be in her lap.

Sasha and I are both writers.
In the mornings I’m in my workspace, doors closed, writing, and Sasha is at her desk doing the same thing. We might wander out of our various spaces, but if the other is hunched over the key board, we don’t say a word. We wait until we know the other is finished for the day. During our silent time, Kafka has no one to play with. He might come into my office holding his toy lobster in his mouth ready to play, but he’ll see me working, so he’ll sit there on the carpet.

He gets bored pretty quickly, and he lets out long sighs so that we know it.

Sometimes he stands at the door to the balcony until one of us lets him out, and he’ll go out there alone and stare at the intersection. He barks at the old women coming out of the Escher house, he watches the beeping garbage trucks lift dumpsters with their massive metal claws and pour all that smelly garbage into the back of their tucks. When he’s done being alone, and when we’re done with our need for solitude, he’ll run into the house with his lobster in his mouth ready to play.

Like I said, he has own social life, and sometimes he’ll play for hours with our neighbor, and sometimes Kafka will stay the night with him.

Sometimes Sasha will come home from teaching her class. She’ll hug me, hold me for a while, and then suddenly she’ll perk up, look around. “Where’ Kafka?” she’ll ask, realizing he hasn’t jumped up on the bed to be with us.

“He’s with his tío,” I say. “They’re hanging out.”

Our neighbor is a famous writer, that is, as famous as a writer can be without breaking into popular culture. He is a novelist and a poet, one of the most well-known writers in El Paso or from El Paso. He has won so many awards it’s hard to keep track, the American Book Award, Landan Foundation. He publishes on an average two books a year. When I was a young Chicano writer starting out in the MFA program at the University of Oregon, the poet Garret Hongo introduced us to his work, and I admired it. He was one of the reasons I thought El Paso might be a good place for me, because of the way he wrote about it. Now, he’s our neighbor.

We live in a renovated two story building, which really must have been something when it was new but which became a slum. It used to be a crack house, and it was in such bad shape the city closed it down, declared it a fire hazard. Then our landlord bought it and did what is unusual for El Paso, spent over a year getting it into great shape, and now it’s beautiful. We have the entire top floor, Ben on one side and Sasha, Kafka and me on the other. People sometimes ask what it’s like living next to a famous writer, El Paso’s favorite man of letters, and I tell them I don’t know, ask my neighbor. 

Really, I tell them it’s like a sitcom called The Writer’s Block.

(End Part One)

Sayulita: Images and Magic

2009-07-22T08:31:00.000-07:00

Sasha and I are spending the summer in Puerto Vallarta. We brought a camera, but we don’t really take many pictures. It’s been sitting in a drawer of the condo we rented, and the only time we’ve used it was when we saw a huge iguana climbing up the wall across the way, but by the time we found the camera and turned it on, the iguana was gone.

Oh, and across from our balcony I was struck by this image of chairs on a rooftop.

That's essentially what we do with our camera, we capture images that strike us, no matter where we are. I’ve traveled to a lot of places, sometimes famous places like Paris or Buenos Aires, and my friends are disappointed that I never take a camera, and if I do, I come back with pictures not of the famous landmarks but of images that I like.

Sometimes people take pictures of the famous landmarks just so they can go back home and show their friends that they were there, and sometimes I even hear that among tourists, “Now we can say we saw the Eifel Tower!"

I don’t come back with pictures of the Eifel Tower or tango dancers, because if that’s what one wants, one could Google image search and find plenty of them, from photographers much more able than me.

Why enter a new city only to experience the images one has had before even entering the city?

Whenever possible, I liked to submit to a city, to feel its spirit and its rhythms, and to move through its streets and corridors according to how they city teaches me to move, not according to images that I have already had before I came.

You must see this, then this, then this!

Then you can tell your friends you have seen the city.

I remember the first time I got back from Paris, and someone asked me, “Did you visit the Eiffel Tower.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t get around to it.”

“Oh,” they said, deflated.

But I drank beers in a bar with second generation African immigrants, in a neighborhood where there were no white people, let alone tourists, where on the corners boys dressed hip-hop style and listened to rap en francais, and one of the guys I drank with, an older man who lived on the edge of the city, took me for a ride in his rickety old car, zipping in and out of Paris traffic, until we ended up on a dimly lit street in a poor neighborhood and stopped at a Guadeloupe restaurant where he knew the owner, and where we all drank strong fruity drinks from his country until we are all very drunk.

One cannot experience the spirit of a place if the images and expectations of the place come from without, that is, if the cultural meaning of a place is already fixed.

So I'm afriad to say, I have no pictures of Puerto Vallarta, but I found this one on Google.

Pretty, ain't it?

In fact, when I go to a new place I don’t even like to bring a camera, because I want to experience the place, to feel it, and if I’m struck by some experience, I would rather write about it, or just remember it, let it exist as a memory within me. Some mystics say that our souls are made up of memories, so even if I don’t remember every detail of an experience, it becomes part of me, my spirit.
Memories co-create me.

However, a few days ago, Sasha and I had to be like tourists with a camera.

We had to bring a camera with us on what was supposed to be an afternoon excursion to Sayulita, a small town about an hour away from PV.

See, our friend Agustin F. Porras used to live there when he received a fellowship that would support him to do anything he wanted for about a year (yeah, he’s one of those genius types). The only scholarship I ever got as a student I had to pay back after graduation.

It was called a student loan!

With this fellowship money, he got in his VW bug and drove through Mexico, ending up in Sayulita, a small beach town in Nayarit, where he would spend a year, reading, thinking, writing poetry. I had met Augie in the MFA program at the University of Oregon, where the three of us, him, me, and the late poet Andrés Montoya where the only Chicano students in the program.

In Sayulita, he lived underneath a palapa, a grass hut without walls, sleeping on a hammock. He read all 1,000 pages of Don Quixote, he told me, the entire story, while he was there in the jungle.

“You should read it,” he always tells me.

Now, he wanted Sasha and I to go to Sayulita, to see what it was like, to go see if we could find any of the people he knew. He gave us names of expats who owned restaurants or coffee shops, and told us to ask them if they remember him. It was quiet and small, he always told me, and many places didn’t have running water or electricity.

For a year he ate fish he caught with his hands and drank coconut milk from the shell. He took walks in the jungle, a machete in one hand, and with the other he brushed off the scorpions that fell from trees onto his shoulders, and he danced around snakes that shot out from the rocks.

Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating.

He didn’t say it was quite that way, but he did say that to see Sayulita I might be able to understand him a bit more, because who he is now was probably influenced a lot by that place.

Augie is one of the most Zen people I have ever known. He’s kind, patient, and always at peace, so we agreed to go to Sayulita, maybe see the place that taught him to be at one with everything, maybe get a bit of the magic for ourselves.

Take pictures, he said, and he didn’t mean the artsy-fartsy pictures I usually take of chairs on rooftops.

So, all this has been a very large introduction to sharing the photos we took.

These are for you Augie.

Sayulita.

We got out our camera, got on the bus in PV, and we arrived late afternoon on a very hot day.

The bus dropped us off by a bridge. Here’s the first thing we saw.

Once we crossed over the bridge we found ourselves in a small town, which seemed very slow and quiet.

And very Mexican.

After crossing through the town, we made it to the beach.

Here's an image I knoow Augie will like.

Augie's all about the duende.

Although he might be disspaointed that one of the boys in the image is texting.

They didn't even have telephones when Augie lived there.

Actually, the ATV above probably breaks his heart.

(Tomorrow I'll add more Sayulita images. Remember we were only going to spend an afternoon?
Well, things got a little weird and...well, I'll tell you about it in the next entry.

Virtually See you then.

Chacon)

The Bridge of Time: Puente and Chabot College

2009-04-29T08:54:00.000-07:00

When my good friend, the late poet Andrés Montoya and I graduated from the University of Oregon, we were lucky enough to have jobs, maybe not as sweet of a deal as our classmate Chang Rae Lee got, a three year visiting professorship under Garret Hongo, but neither did we, like Chang Rae, get a big book deal from Riverhead. Native Speaker was bought up before he even graduated with his MFA.

Nor was I, quite frankly, I must admit (gulp)as good of a writer as he was.

Or I should say, we were different writers.

He wrote beautiful language-based fiction, quiet like a prayer, and I wrote shout-out-loud, in-your-face short stories about messed-up Chicanos who mess up themselves and others, who, when they try to love, end up punching everybody, stories with more passion than craft.

I got a job at Modesto Junior College (More about that place later) and Andrés got a job at Chabot College in Hayward.
We both taught composition, lots of classes of composition, which means we had piles and piles of papers to comment on and grade, hundreds of students each semester.

One of the reasons writers who graduate from MFA programs do not go on to publish even one book is all the papers they have to grade. I know so many great writers, people brilliant with words and images, writers as talented as any of the greats, but they never publish a book because they spend so much time teaching so many classes. They never write.

Writing, I tell my student, is not about talent. It’s about persistence. If you are driven enough to learn your craft, if you are willing to cheat your employer and when you’re supposed to be doing work at your desk you’re really reading or writing, you’ll publish a book.

Anyway, Andrés got a job teaching composition, including the Puente classes, at Chabot College.

So in 2009, on my book tour, when I had the opportunity to visit Chabot, I was very excited.

The last time I had been on that campus was when Andrés invited me to his Puente class to read one of my stories, which was called “Chicano Chicanery” and was about some Chicano university students who write “Fuck Shakespeare” all over the campus walls and hallways, as a means of protesting white cultural dominance.

I’m not sure if it was a good story, but Howard Junker liked it, and he ended up putting it in Zyzzyva, under a different title. When my first book came out, Chicano Chicanery, the New York editor hired by Arte Público didn’t like the story much. I guess she didn't think writing anti-Shakespeare messages was very funny, and she asked me to take it out of the book.

Anyway, years ago I read that story for Andrés’ Puente class, and they seemed to love it. Puente is a program at some California community colleges designed to assist under-represented Latino students to transfer to four year universities. In their English classes, they teach Chicano literature.

Maybe they liked my story so much because for the first time they were taking a literature class where they read stories and poems written not by dead white men, but by Chicanas and Chicanos like themselves.

After my reading in Andrés class--at a time I only dreamed of having a book published--some of the Puente students came up to the desk where I sat and asked me to sign their copies of the Fuck Shakespeare story, which Andrés had photo copied from a dot matrix print out.

Signing my name, I felt like a real writer, and I loved Puente so much that I would help start one at my own school, and I would become a Puente teacher .

Well, fast forward the camera of my life to now, and I’m on my book tour for Unending Rooms. I got an opportunity to go back to Chabot College for a big reading and book signing.

It was going to be a great event, open to the entire school, organized by Ramón Garcia, the Puente Counselor at Chabot, who has been fighting for justice since before Andrés and I were fighting for a place in line at the jungle gym.

It was going to be a great event: A former Puente teacher returns with four published books.

But I blew it.

I scheduled two events on different sides of the state, on the same day, at the same time.

I wrote to Ramón apologizing, and although he was disappointed, (he had made such beautiful fliers!) he was kind about it. He had to cancel the event, but he offered to let me come another day, the only day I had free, a Monday afternoon.

He said it was too late to get the awesome theater he had reserved for the event and to invite the entire college, but I could visit the Puente class.

I jumped at the opportunity, not only because it was what I had done years earlier in Andrés’ class, but also because I love the Puente Students.

They love literature. They love writing.

Early Monday morning, at about 6 am, Sasha , Kafka and I drove from Fresno, where we were staying with our good friend Lee Herrick, to Hayward.

We were met by Ramon himself, and after showing us around, we went to his office, where we reminisced about when Andrés was the Puente teacher, how one time he helped students organize a protest. It got pretty wild, and the cops showed up and tried to break it up. One of them pushed Andres out of the way, and Andrés, not a pushover, might have pushed back.

He was handcuffed and arrested in front of all his Latino Students, charged with assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest.

I remember he called me that night and told me about it, and I shook my head and said, “Ay, Andrés!”

Years later, Ramón showed us around campus, the places Andrés used to teach, his office, and then he bought us a cup of coffee.

We went to the class, and it was great.

Sasha, who held Kafka (you know he’s our puppy, right?), said it was the best reading I had ever done.

The students loved the stories. From Unending Rooms, I read “The Tree That Wouldn’t Leave Sara Alone” a children’s tale (maybe) about a big oak tree that falls in love with a little girl and follows her everywhere. She has to get an injunction.

I had only brought a few books to sell, thinking the students wouldn’t have enough money to buy them, but they lined up afterward and bought them all within ten minutes. I had to run back to the car for more.

I know it went so well because of them, the Puente students, and not because I’m so fantastic.

I don’t mean that in false humility.

The Puente students were great that day, and because of that fact, they saw greatness in me.

Who is a genius?

Those who find genius in everyone, everywhere, at anytime.

The Puente class was full of geniuses.

After they had all gone on to their next classes, Ramón took us to a small café downtown, that had outdoor seating, which we needed because we had Kafka with us.

We ate the best fish tacos I had ever had in my life, shark tacos, mahi mahi tacos, salmon tacos.

Kafka sat on the sidewalk, watching the people pass. Then he laid down and slept for a while.

Live from Oregon!!!

2009-04-09T07:15:00.000-07:00

I just arrived in Medford Oregon and then made my way to Ashland and am staying at this hotel.

It's one of those old boutique hotels, where the furniture is like from a Jean Paul Satre play about hell (2nd Empire Furniture) and the rooms are very small but not at all hellish.

It's nice.

I'm on the top floor looking out on the city where they have the great Shakespeare festival.

This morning I'm going to be on the radio for an hour talking about my novel, and the shadows took him, which is set here in Southern Oregon.

The Latino students at Southern Oregon State University invited me, and they are treating me very well. Check out the SOU Latino Student Union myspace profile and the poster they made for tonight's the event. Looks like a poster for a baile, no?

Last night they took me to dinner, about twenty students, at a restaurant that stayed open late just for us.

Even though my novel is set here, I haven't been here since before I wrote it. Check out this recent article about books set in this valley, including shadows.

It's so much bigger now, and there are a lot more raza then there used to be. Back when I used to come to Medford, there were few Mexicanos, mostly those who worked in the orchards, and mostly men, who came and went with the seasons. But now, there are everywhere. We are everywhere, even in the university, even giving a reading tonight.

These young people of the Latino Student Organization, are puro Latino, puro Mexicano, but they're also Oregonians, many of them having lived here most of their lives.

Oregon Chicanos, man!

You gotta love them.

¡Aztlán, Oregon!

¡Con Safos y que!

Lynn Middle School Revisited

2009-04-05T09:44:00.000-07:00

You know how we lie to ourselves when we enter bookstores? We say to ourselves that we won’t but anything, we’re only going to look?

We love to browse through new books (used ones too, but that’s a different story).

We love to look at the images on the front covers, we read titles and the blurbs on the backs covers, and sometimes we open the book and read the first paragraph, just to see if it grabs our attention.

Some people like the smell of new books,
and they hold them like an oxygen mask over their faces and take in the smell

I like to read the first sentences of books, and if I it blows me away, I read the first paragraph, and if that blows me away, the first page, and if that blows me away, etc.

In spite of my promises, I leave bookstores with at least one new book for our shelves, sometimes several.

As will happen, I often forget about these books for many years.

But somehow, my soul must have known what I was doing, why I choose that particular book.

One day, years later maybe, a decade later, I pull that book off of the shelf and read it, and it somehow seems like the most appropriate thing for me to read at that time.

Like it was meant to be.

Like it was exactly what I needed to read.

That’s not a mistake, that’s not a coincidence, that’s not chance. That’s my soul knowing.

Even when I don’t know it, my soul me, the spiritual me, somehow knows that a particular book will be important to me.

There are several books on our shelves that I have yet to read, but I know I will, and I know when I read them, it’ll be right.

Remember those great kids at Lynn Middle School who lined up to buy my books after I visited their school? (See the blog entry called Benediction below)

I imagined these kids might wait a while before they read them, but it seems these kids couldn’t wait.

Their teacher, Lisa Weinbaum, wrote me an email.

As sweet as your blog is, Daniel, your book is not sitting idly on a bookshelf waiting to be read. Most of the kids have already read it.

A girl named Caitlyn read it twice.

Well, every month I have the kids do book projects. Basically they can make ANYTHING to represent their book, then they talk about the book to the class. Caitlyn finished And the Shadows Took Him, not once, but twice. She sculpted this herself. Man, is it heavy, too.

See the head inside the basket?

She clearly read the novel, and if you have read and the shadows took him, you know from where in the novel she got this idea.

You know about the father and his collection of heads.

When I was still writing the novel I considered calling it Father of 1,000 Heads.

If we ever come out with a third printing, Caitlyn’s art work would make a great cover, wouldn't it?

She captured part of the novel's soul with her art.

In the Valley of the Whale: Reading in Fresno

2009-03-31T12:22:00.000-07:00

Fresno is my home. It will always be my home.

It has so many things dear to me, my family, friends from childhood, new friends, former students, the Tower District, The Million Elephant, which, if not one of the best Thai restaurants around, certainly has one of the best restaurant names.

Fresno has all the levels or schools I've gone to, from Kindergarten at Robinson Elementary, to Hoover High, to Fresno City College and a master's degree at Fresno State.

It has the old homes of my dead grandparents, and the home on Mesa Street where I grew up, the house in which my mother died in the living room on a hospice bed, all the family around her,
holding her cold, bony hands, putting our own hands on her head and shoulders in prayer, until her last breath, the same house in which my father still lives. It has many of the homes in my imagination.

And it has the most incredible street in the entire world, the most important road of my creativity.

The street of which I speak is greater than the Roman Iter, greater than all the ancient or modern broad ways that cut into the great cities of the world.

Blackstone Avenue is the six-lane avenue that cuts through the city from downtown, goes across the river and passes through the homes of the rich, into the mountains, to Yosemite, into blue heaven.

On our way to my first California reading at Fresno State on Friday 13th a few weeks ago, I was driving my red rental car with Texas plates to the reading with Lee Herrick and Sasha. Kafka our dog was with us.

When I turned on Blackstone Avenue to get to the university, Lee told me it would be much faster to take the freeway, but I told him how Blackstone Avenue could take you anywhere.

When I was a kid, my family had been driving back from a family party on the east side of town, and my mother in the front passenger’s seat pointed at a wide avenue lined with neon signs and full of bright cars and lights. She said, “That’s Blackstone (I heard it as two words, black stone). It’ll take you anywhere.”

She meant anywhere in Fresno, Kmart, the fairgrounds, my grandmother’s street in Pinedale, but I was a child who lived in my imagination, and I thought she meant it could take you anywhere in the world.

I thought she meant you could take that street and find yourself suddenly in the jungles of the Amazon, or the great cities of the east, anywhere in the world. I thought she meant you could turn on side streets and you’d be on the moon, or on Saturn, and you could get out of the car and walk across the terrain like a ginger bread man in a space suit.

I could take that road to any place, even where the physical laws of our universe didn’t matter, where trees and ducks could talk, and when you opened books castles and villages bloomed into existence.

I took that road to the reading and I was a kid again in the backseat of my parents' 1961 Chevy Impala, going to see my grandmother, or taking a fun family trip to Roading Park to the zoo. I thought Blackstone Avenue must be the biggest, most important street in the world, and now I was a kid again and I went down that road and entered into the future, Friday 13th 2009, a writer on a book tour. I'm with my lovely wife, the brilliant poet Sasha Pimentel Chacon.

I ended up at California State University, my first California reading for Unending Rooms, in the parking lot next to the Peters Building.

We were a few minutes late to the future. On my way into the building, I saw my dad, waiting by the entrance, so old now, his eyes so bad he had to squint to see me, and I hugged his small body. He smelled of mothballs and cologne.

I saw my cousins, now adults, Chicano men with big hands and bellies, and I saw my sister and her teenage daughter and her husband.

I was in the future.

We all walked into the building together, a line of Chacons, looking for the room.

I saw the woman from the bookstore packing up to leave.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“The books sold out,” she said.

"All of them?"

"Just like that. Some lady bought five," she said.

I pictured one of my aunts buying five books.

I saw the host of the evening, coming out of the light of the theater, in a hurry. He told me everyone had already arrived and we should get started. I could hear the voices in the theater, a cauldron of voices.

We entered into the lights, and I saw it was such a beautiful place, full of light. What a great way to start my California readings.

It was like walking into heaven, all the people you know and love in one spot, there to see you, to share in your happiness, all those shining faces. I was reminded (or maybe as I’m writing this I am reminded) of an ancient poem, Rumi I think, that loosely says something like this,

Tavern or temple

A friend’s face radiates it all.

It must have taken me ten minutes to reach the front, because I kept stopping to hug and kiss everyone. I saw my uncle Thomas sitting next to my aunt Cookie, a stack of five books on her lap.

After I was introduced by Alex Espinoza (a great writer), I went up and introduced my friend Valarie Nikaido. She got up and sang a song “Sabor a Mi.”

Then I introduced Liz Scheid, because I had asked her to share a poem with us.

The song and the poem were beautiful, and the spirits their voices invited into the room gave even more light, more radiance, and it wouldn’t matter what I read after that, the people there had good will, such immense good will.

Whatever story I read, they would be able to enter into the fictional landscape, to see it like a movie playing in their heads, and at the same time they would be able to sense the energy coming from the fictional archetypes, the metaphorical field.

García Lorca used to start his readings by inviting the spirit of brotherhood into

the room (fraternidad) for exactly that reason, so that the metaphors could be felt and understood at the same time.

There was so much fraternidad at Fresno State (I call it good will) that the success of the reading had very little to do with me.

There were so many brilliant people there (all the accomplished writers that make up the MFA faculty, Corrine Clegg Hales and John Hales. Steven Church, Tim Skeen, as well as many of Fresno’s exciting young writers like Lee Herrick, Tim Z. Hernandez, Mike Medrano, and my own brother Kenneth R. Chacon, and so many others, graduate students, teachers, others who just happened to walk in) so many brilliant minds that their collective imaginations filling the room could give radiant form to even the least of my stories.

It was a great success because of them.

After the reading, we had to bring another box of books from the rental car, and we sold twice as much as the bookstore even had in stock.

Sasha, Kafka and I had a free weekend before we had to make our way to the next stop, Hayward, to Chabot College, where I presented to the Puente students.

Talk about brilliant minds.

Next entry, I’ll talk about the Puente Students.

Benediction

2009-03-15T10:32:00.000-07:00

Before I left El Paso, I visited a middle School in Las Cruces, where most of the 120 students I read to were Chicanos, poor like me, some of who would be labeled "at risk" like me.

I read them a new story, one that's still unpublished, and I answered their questions.

Their teacher the amazing true believer in justice, Lisa Weinbaum, had assigned them to read two or three of my stories, including "Too White," "Mexican Table," and "Godoy Lives," all of them from my first book Chicano Chicanery.

They were ready with questions, their hands shooting up, and their little mouths making Arnold Horseshack noises,
Ooo, ooo, pick me!

And then something amazing happened.

Remember, these kids are not the richest kids on the border. Their parents work hard to survive in the economy, but the teacher had told the parents that a Chicano writer would be visiting campus, and if they wanted to send their kids with money, they could buy a book.

I only brought ten books, thinking that only a few would sell.

I've been to readings at universities where only two or three books sell. I've been to other places where all the books sell out.

But after the questions were over, when the kids picked up their backpacks and slung them over their shoulders, they didn't leave. They gathered around the table where I had my books. They held out their money and asked me if I would sign a book for them.

I sold all of them (and gave one away).

It was so cute, but it was more than that. It showed me something Life has been teaching me for many years now.

Recognition from the top doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if I'm invited to great ivory tower universities, where white men with patches on their sport-coat elbows stand in line to buy my book and later write papers about the many metaphorical possibilities of my landscapes.

What matters is to be recognized by the kids at Lynn Middle School.

What matters is that right now and for who knows how many years into the future, my book will be on the shelves of their homes, maybe even one of the few books in the house, and even if they don't read it now, even if it sits unopened for many years, it's there, in their homes. Maybe someday when when they're in high school or when they're adults, they'll open the book and release my spirit into their lives.

And I loved that I started my tour at a Middle School with a majority of Chicano students.

It was like the benediction that opens a poetry book.

It was like a blessing, 120 tiny hands on my head and shoulders blessing me for my journey, blessing my new book.

The Dog Who Saved Shadows

2009-02-22T11:32:00.000-08:00

(Continued from "Who Cares About Your Book, Chicano?" the previous entry)

My novel and the shadows took him was about to die. No one was reading it. No one cared about it.

There was no author to promote it, to read from it, to tell people about it.

He was in Argentina talking to angels.

One night, I was walking along Avenida Santa Fe, one of the busiest streets in the city, people walking at all hours of night, a cafe at ever corner, when something flashed in my eye, some kind of sharp light.

I was crossing an intersection, and I looked away from the light and into the eyes of people crossing in the opposite direction.

I kept looking into people’s eyes as I stepped onto the sidewalk.
I looked into as many eyes as I could, people sitting in sidewalk cafes, people walking opposite me, people sitting on the ground begging, people looking into shop windows.

Suddenly I saw lights bursting out of their heads.

This is hard to describe, but I saw it.

Lights came from people’s heads and reached all the way to up into the sky. I looked up and saw the yellow glow that covers the city at night.

I could see light pouring from everybody's head, and sometimes, the light was strong, like on children pulling carts full of cardboard and some old ladies begging in front of the church steps, light shooting up from their heads like they were standing under the beam of a transporter. On other people the lights were more dull, as if the person from who it shot was barely alive, or maybe, people who had so much darkness within them that the light barely filtered through their heads and shot up to the heavens.

I knew I was seeing something beyond the veil, like the energy of God shooting in and out of all people, or maybe I was seeing some version of human auras. But I knew something was about to change in the way I see reality.

Nothing else happened that night, and unfortunately I would never see those lights again, not with the same intensity, because the next day I got an email from Elaine, the lady who was watching my dog during my year off.

Felix was in trouble, she wrote. He missed me so much that no fence or dog kennel could keep him in.

He destroyed everything and escaped, running across the city, across busy boulevards and big parking lots, until he found a spot that smelled familiar to him, the parks we used to walk in, the stores we used to shop at, the porch of the house where we used to live.

One time a friend of hers, who had had only seen Felix once, saw him standing outside of Walgreens, waiting at the door.

“Felix?” she asked, approaching the dog, who kept looking at the door of the store and all the people coming in and out.

She looked at his collar and saw that it was indeed Felix.

She called Elaine and told her where he was, and Elaine came and got him.

It was the Walgreen’s where we used to walk together, and I would tell Felix to stay, and I would go inside and get what I needed, while he waited by the door, certain his daddy was coming back.

“He misses you so much,” Elaine wrote.

She tired keeping him indoors, but he tried to get out and go look for me, and he destroyed her blinds, her door, and the alarm system by the door.

This had been going on for months, and bless her generous soul, she didn’t say anything to me, because she didn’t want to take my year abroad away from me. But now, Elaine was very ill and had to go to the hospital.

Another friend picked Felix up from Elaine’s, but when he started destroying her house too, trying to get out, she said she was sorry, but I had to come and get him.
Either I had to send Felix to a kennel, where he probably would have died of fear, or I had to give up my year in Buenos Aires.

I went home.

Felix was so excited to see me he jumped up and down and got on his back and cried for half an hour. We both cried.

Before I had left for Buenos Aires, I had sold my car, my furniture, and I had rented out my house. I had nowhere to go.

I took some money from the bank, a good chunk of what I had planned on living off of, and I bought a used Saturn.

Felix and I jumped in and drove across the country, to California, where we spent the next four months couch surfing. It was the happiest time of his life. We were together 24/7. We were on the road most of the time, stopping to run on beaches or on the banks of rivers or through city parks we had never seen before.
When I slept on someone’s couch, he slept right there on the floor next to me, occasionally touching my hand with his cold nose, just to make sure I was still there.

It wasn’t what I had planned to do for my year away from teaching, but it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me, to us, not only for the great time I spent on the couches of family and friends, to feel all their love, to get to know them better, but it kept my novel alive.

I had spent a lot of my money on the car, on gas, on food, so I needed to find a way to make some money.

That was when I set up readings for shadows. I visited several colleges and universities, and even some high school students, I did signings, I spoke with students about being a writer, and I did signings at bookstores. At one event, a Young Writer’s Conference in Fresno, I read to about a thousand people. I read from and the shadows took him. At the readings, people bought the book, a bunch of people, and some professors at those readings started using it in their classes. It went from one million on Amazon when I was in Buenos Aires to under a hundred thousand when I was home in California.

I know, that doesn't sound like much, almost a hundred thousand books selling at that time better than mine, but I didn't become a bestseller, I became a midlist writer.

A month later it came out in paperback.

I hate to say, Felix died this summer, a few years after our time in California.

It was very hard on us. He was a family member.

It’s funny to think that if he hadn’t been around, shadows wouldn’t be around.

It’s still used in a lot of Latino/a literature classes, thanks to my hooshker dooshker doo.

Who Cares About Your New Book, Chicano?

2009-02-17T07:45:00.000-08:00

There are over 170,000 books published each year in the United States.

That's about 465 books published each day.

Or 14, 166 books a month.

Or 19 books every hour.

That's a lot of books.

And these numbers do not include self-published books or vanity presses, which can be made available by the writers on Amazon.com, but books published by presses, companies that come out with books by authors.

Some of my students and ex-students, frustrated with the difficulty of getting published, have done it themselves, posted it on Amazon, got their friends to write reviews, as if to say Screw you! to the publishing companies. I just want a book.

The fact is, most people don't know the difference between presses, a book is a book, and if a mother can brag to her friends that her son or daughter wrote a book that's published and everything, why would it matter who published the book?

How much do self published books add to the 170,000 published each year, I don't know. I just know there's a lot of books.

And very few of them will ever make it on the shelves of bookstores.

I have three books out, four if you count the selected works I co-edited of Jose Antonio Burciaga's work.

Whenever I walk into a bookstore, I can't help it, I look for my books. I look for Chacon, but mostly I see Chabon or Chaon. Rarely do I see my own books, and when I do, I'm very happy. I take it up to the cashiers and tell them that I'm the author and can sign it if they'd like.

I do this because once signed, they cannot return it, they can add one of those stickers to it that says, "Signed by the author."

The fact is, it's hard to find my books in bookstores, and one of my books, my novel and the shadows took him, is published by one of the big New York companies.

When it came out, they sent me on a book tour, I flew first class for the first time, and I felt oh so important, like a real writer. Agents picked me up at the airports and drove me around the cities.

But in every city where I showed at a Barnes and Noble or Borders Books there were about three, sometimes four people who showed up for my reading and signing.

At one Borders bookstore in San Diego, nobody showed up.
Not a soul.

They had a stack of my books, a table for me to sit and sign, and they even gave me a bottle of Evian water, but I sat there alone, watching people walk by.

I ended up walking around the store with copies of my book and introduced myself to disinterested shoppers. They would hold the book and and say, Nice. Then they handed it back to me, smiled apologetically and walked away.

That's the reality of being a ....(gulp!. I'll admit it) a midlist writer.

What is a midlist writer?

Well, we're not bestsellers. Out of the 170,000 books published each year in this country, about 20 of them are read by everybody. Midlist books are not among that 20.

We midlisters write what might be called literature, and we are often published by independent or university presses, although I know many midlist writers who have New York trade presses that hope publishing them will someday pay off.

the reality of publishing in today's gluted market is a writer must go out and promote his or her book.

Unending Rooms, a collection of stories, is my new book.

It came out in November 2008, which was during a busy semester. Like many writers, I make my living teaching other writers in a university MFA program.

I didn't have time to go out and promote Unending Rooms, but this semester I'm doing a book tour.

(New Post 2-18-09)

First let me tell you a little about the new book, Unending Rooms.

But first, I need to back up.

When my first novel and the shadows took him came out, I made a big mistake.

I was naive about being a writer in a country where over 170,000 books are published each year, over 10,000 of them being books of fiction, where every hour a new book of fiction is published.

I made a stupid mistake.

See, I had a big New York company on my side, they sent me on a tour, they sent over three hundred review copies of the book to newspapers and magazines throughout the country, so maybe I thought I had arrived as a writer. After the reviews came out, after the tour, after the visits to colleges campuses where I would be introduced by a literature professor with patches on his sports coat elbows, I would be able to walk into any book store in the country and there it would be, Chabon, Chacon, Chaon.

Like a rhythm, Chabon, Chacon, Chaon.

Book tour fantasies took over, and I saw images like in the movies, or like that Sienfeld episode where Elaine's ex comes out with a book and sits in some busy Manhattan bookstore, hundreds of people in line waiting for him to sign their copy.

But that didn't happen.

At my first reading of the tour in San Antonio, two Chicano guys were the only ones in the audience, and they just happened to be there. When they saw another Chicano guy, and that he had a book, they said, Orale! and they stayed and listened to me read. Neither of them bought a copy.

You know how many reviews it got?

Two.

The El Paso Times (the city in which I live) and the San Antonio newspaper.

My readings were announced in the LA times, the New York Post, and some major magazines, but that was it, a few sentences with just the information.

And I was about to make one of my biggest blunders.

And if you have a book, don't make this mistake.

And if you already have a book or books, I'm sure your were smart enough not to make this mistake.

My mistake:

I took a year off from the university, without pay.

That doesn't sound so bad, and it wouldn't have been, had I used that year to promote the book.

But I fled to Buenos Aires, a place so far away, so much another part of the planet that water swirls the opposite way down the drain.

It was a great city.

I decided to spend a year there, just writing, reading, and enjoying the city.

I loved it.

I walked.

I rented an apartment in Palermo,

on Borges Street,

just a few blocks from his childhood home.

I ate empanadas and drank malbec.

I ate lunch at outdoor cafes near a plaza and watched the tango dancers perform for tips.

I worked every day on my new novel, waking up each morning and working so many hours that I not only lost track of time, but I often lost track of space. I didn't always know which landscape I was really in. I wasn't always sure if I was hungry or if my character was hungry, so I wasn't always sure if it was me getting on my coat and heading out of the building to the streets or if I was writing my character getting on his coat and heading out of the building to the streets.

And I read. I read Poe, Paul Auster, and Toni Morrison. I read Cortazar, Sabato, Neruda, Verlaine,Ruben Dario, and Baudelaire. And I read Borges, Borges after Borges,

poetry, fiction, non-fictions, and so many interviews, books and books of interviews with Borges, so much so that I could hear his voice sometimes when I thought of something, as if he were giving his opinion on my thoughts. And I read the books Borges led me to, fiction by Stevenson and Chesterson, three volumes of Swedenborg, Thomas Merton, and I started to read Kabbalah.

And at night, or on days when I only wrote for a few hours, I went out into the city and walked. Some days I walked for eight hours, sin rumbo, just walked, and I met people and talked. Sometimes I ended up at open mic readings or independent theaters, where the young actors had piercings and smelled like patouchi oil.

I lived a few blocks from the Botanical Gardens and the Zoologico, the same one where Borges became entranced with a tiger and the same zoo visited by Cortazar, where I imagined that he imagined for the first time the story that would become "Axolotl." From my apartment I could sometimes hear the elephants crying. It was there that I become entranced by the Elephant and realized how strongly I identified with that animal, that inside of me there was an elephant. I would stare at him for hours and imagined that he was staring back at me.

It was an amazing time for me.

But it was a disaster for the book.

Back home, with nobody around to promote shadows, nobody bought it.

I don't think it ever ranked less than one million on Amazon.

Do you know what this means?

When you go to Amazon.com you can see how a book is selling vis-a-vis other books.

Currently I'm reading Roberto Bolanos, 2006, which I love so much I'm thinking of using in a graduate class next semester.

Out of curiosity, I checked 2666 on Amazon and it was ranked 350 in book sales.

That means there are only 350 books in print (and there must be millions of books in print) that are selling better on Amazon than Bolano's book.

When I was walking the streets of Buenos Aires, I would sometimes step into an internet cafe and check my email, and sometimes I would see how my new novel was doing.

I expected it would at least be less than 10,000, maybe even less than a thousand, but it was always over one million.

That meant that over one million books were selling better than my new novel.

No one was reading it.

The book tour, the announcements in newspapers and magazines, the two reviews it got, were not enough to sell the book.

and the shadows took him was failing.

But then something happened, something out of nowhere that may have saved the life of my novel, which today, in paperback, is still in print.

(more later)