The annual Biblioteca book sale—a lasting pleasure
By Robin Velte, March 16, 2007

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Biblioteca Pública book sale Sat, Mar 17, 10am—1pm Biblioteca Pública patio Insurgentes 25

Until just a few years ago, the English language collection in our Biblioteca was comprised entirely of donated books. Thank heavens, those days are gone forever. A generous budget has permitted this library to beef up its reference section, replace some of those worn-out donated books from the past and purchase the latest fiction and nonfiction titles.

But hard-core readers are never satisfied, and some want books to keep on their coffee tables and their shelves. For readers needing to nurse their affliction, a special sale of donated books, magazines, videos and audio media is being held on March 17 on the library’s patio.

Everyone wins at the sale. Readers will find books they want at very low prices. At the same time, all the proceeds go for the purchase of new books for the library. What doesn’t sell at this special Saturday sale is turned over immediately to the library’s Bodega de Sorpresas for its weekly Thursday sale. All the proceeds from the Bodega sale go into the scholarship fund.

Even with the generous amount that the Biblioteca Pública budgets for books, there are always areas that need to be upgraded. Our Latin American collection in the Sala Quetzal and our extensive art collection are both overflowing with too many worn-out volumes, many of which should be replaced. There’s also a growing need in the community for more audio and large-print books. Our fiction collection, an area of consistently heavy circulation, demands constant attention. Many titles in that section are tattered and in need of replacement.

Deciding what new books to purchase and which of the old ones merit replacement is the responsibility of the English Book Committee. Committee members have selection criteria that guide decisions on purchasing. The selection criteria document, by the way, is posted for you at the “Recent Arrivals” shelves.

Needless to say, donations from library members for the purchase of new books are always welcomed. Last year, an anonymous donor gave the library a sizeable sum, specifying that all of it go for biography/memoir, nonfiction and children’s books.

You too can name your favorite genre or area of emphasis with your donation. Make your check payable to the Biblioteca Pública de San Miguel de Allende, A.C., with a notation on the check that the donation is for books. Better yet, call me at 154-4661 about how you would like your money spent. 

I look forward to seeing you at our sale on Saturday, March 17.



Here are a few examples of what you will see on our patio tables:

• A collection of Artist’s Magazine for the aspiring artistic muse in all of us.

• Mysteries/thrillers and suspense novels by Dick Francis, Patricia Cornwall, John Grisham, Faye Kellerman, etc.

• From the estate of Stirling Dickinson, books on growing orchids.

• Classics by such authors as Turgenev, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Austen. 

• How-to books, such as The Complete Idiot’s Guide to a Healthy Relationship.

• Audio books galore, including a copy of Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain.

• For the puzzle lovers, more than 20 paperback word searches.

• Cookbooks, including one on Mexican cooking and low-fat cooking.

• Bartlett’s Favorite Quotations for those seeking the perfect phrase for the perfect moment.

Robin Velte is a librarian and has been chair of the Book Committee at the Biblioteca Pública 2005.

The gestalt of the story: Point of view in Lord of the Dolls
By Eva Hunter

Presentation
“Finding & Writing The Story”
March 21, 5pm
Sala Quetzal, Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
Free 

Jo and I don’t see the story in the same way. 

Jo Brenzo is the photographer for the book, Lord Of The Dolls: Voyage In Xochimilco. I am its writer. We both tell a story of a man, some dolls and a tiny island in the ancient canal system of Xochimilco. The modality, the genre, of our story-telling is different: we are writer and photographer. But the process of telling the story is much the same, as it involves, for both of us, image choice and decisions about detail.

Jo and I share a central image—an island where an old man displayed dolls and doll parts in a rather unorthodox way. Jo, though, sees a story that is fairly benign. A lonely old man rescues abandoned dolls and doll parts from garbage cans and canals, attaches them to trees and ropes, and makes them his friends.

I see a different story. My reporter’s radar went wild the first time I stepped onto this island, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that there was something more intense, more sinister, happening here than the remnants of an old man’s desire for companionship. I wasn’t sure what that something was, but I knew if we could find it, there’d be a tale worth telling.

Early on in our conversations about doing a book together, Jo and I had agreed that we would make two distinct pieces of art that ran parallel, rather than either piece necessarily illustrating the other. Jo’s would be a story told through fine arts photography; mine through literary nonfiction. 

In addition to the stunningly uneasy beauty the vignettes of fractured dolls afforded, Jo was personally interested in Don Julián Santana, the man who put the island’s art together.

My interest in Julián was limited. I wanted to know how his creation fit into the larger scope of the culture of the canals, and into the story of the conquest of Mexico.

Julian spent his life in Xochimilco. He was, the obituary published in a local Xochimilco paper said, a “man of the old ways.” One of the reasons for Julián’s doll island, given by his nephew who has been caretaker of the island since Julián’s death five years ago, was that the dolls were on the island “to keep the spirits away at night.” But an immediate question for me had to do with whether or not there were similar examples of doll display, or veneration, in Xochimilco.



And what about the canals themselves? I knew that Xochimilco’s canal system was the sole remnant of the magnificent lake the Conquistadors had skirted for days on their journey to the Aztec capitol of Tenoctitlan. I knew, also, that in the inner, private areas, the canal people still lived in much the same manner they had lived before Cortez. Was there, then, a logic that somehow connected Don Julián’s island and Xochimilco to the old Aztec-dominated culture?

The answers could only come from the people who live on the canals.

When people ask me how long it took to write this book, I answer, “four years.” Jo, however, worked on the project six years—for two years before she showed me the early photographs of the island. But, in fact, the literal “writing” of the book took abut three months. Most of my time during that four years was spent in a series of returns to the island: languorous trips on the canals, returning over and over again until we were no longer strangers to the people who lived there, but friends—of a sort. At least enough so, that we could be trusted with insider stories of Xochimilco, and its dolls.

For there is an extended doll connection in Xochimilco. Slowly, over a period of several trips, we were told about a small living god, a god only for the people of Xochimilco, a god who takes the outward form of a small wooden doll. A living, miracle-performing doll-god, who demands daily feeding, and daily worship. In the process, I found the answers to my questions.

Or, the probable answers. For a story is only true in relationship to its teller’s conception of truth. When the canal people told us of the miracles performed by their small god, who leaves his house to play alone in the muddy streets each night, they were telling the truth as they knew it; the truth they have chosen to make sense of their world. When the canal people told us they did not know the origin of their small exclusive god, they were telling us the truth—to the extent they dared tell the truth. The keeping of ancient secrets can be a difficult habit to break.

Like the people of Xochimilco, the writer, too, must choose the truth that makes the most sense to the story. As must the photographer. The fact that Jo’s story is different from mine creates, I believe, an interesting textural juxtaposition, rather than a contradiction, to this journey into an ancient culture.

In “Finding and Writing the Story,” I will read from the book, discuss the process of writing and answer questions. 

And who knows? With sufficient encouragement, I just might be enticed to reveal the book’s, and Xochimilco’s ultimate secret. At least, according to my point of view.

Eva Hunter is a widely published, and award-winning writer who makes her home in San Miguel de Allende. A founding member of The Writer’s Workshop:San Miguel, she is a personal writing coach and offers periodic writing workshops.

Leonard Bird, atomic veteran, reads at Teatro Santa Ana
By Bill Pearlman (with Leonard Bird)

Poetry reading Leonard Bird Wed, Mar 21, 5:30pm Teatro Santa Ana, Biblioteca Pública Insurgentes 25 50 pesos

There’s a poetry of commitment, a poetry of nostalgia, a poetry of archetypal transcendence, and there’s the poetry of Leonard Bird, at once a poetry of serious political intelligence and a poetry of hope in a challenged world. Leonard “Red” Bird is an atomic veteran, a former Marine who witnessed the largest nuclear blast ever detonated over America. That experience and his three journeys to Hiroshima’s Park for World Peace provide the warp and woof of his extraordinary book, Folding Paper Cranes: An Atomic Memoir. His poetry is, to quote Leslie Marmon Silko, prize winning author of Ceremony, “…beautiful writing with a generosity of spirit that lifts the human heart.”

While Leonard Bird reads poems from Folding Paper Cranes and other works, it really is not so much a “reading” as a performance. His delivery is clear, powerful, even, elegant. I caught up with Red Bird here, in San Miguel, where he is staying for a few months. Following is a brief exchange we had about his work.



BP: What do you hope to accomplish with your work as a poet and atomic veteran?

LB: I am a poet first and atomic veteran second. All poetry should enhance life. My nuclear poetry asks us to confront our darker realities. Much of my other poetry sings of life in its richness and beauty. We need both.

BP: You talk about moving from despair over the nuclear warfare situation and then your trajectory

toward hope. Can you give us some idea how this works in the practice of your poetry?

LB: To amplify what I just said: Full maturity requires that we face—rather than deny—our tendency to see the “Other” as an “It” rather than a “Thou.” We honor the teachings of Jeremiah, Jesus and the Buddha but create a world of greed and narcissism. Many of my poems attempt to confront our capacity for darkness.

Many of my other poems focus on the manifold and diverse joys of being fully human, alive, aware,

connected to this splendid earth and delighted with our capacity for greatness. 

BP: Folding Paper Cranes contains both prose and poetry. Can you talk about what poetry can do that prose can’t, and why this combination in your books works so well?

LB: Well-wrought prose can spin out and explicate complex narratives and ideas, and can be deeply

moving. Prose should be as well written as good poetry, but usually isn’t. Partly because poetry

relies heavily on sensate language and metaphor, it can explore and evoke emotional depths. Prose tends to travel horizontally. Poetry travels vertically; it sinks shafts. Most memoirs ignore the power of poetry. I like the rhythm the combination allows.

For an hour of richly powerful poetry, come to the Teatro Santa Ana on Wednesday, March 21.