Authors’ Sala Special Series

Beginning anew
By Linda Sorin, May 4, 2007



Readings
“Works in Progress”
Fri, May 4, 5–7pm
Posada San Francisco, Plaza Principal 2
50 Pesos, includes wine reception

Last year it was SRO—“standing room only” at the first ever Authors’ Sala “Works in Progress” event. The audience, laughed, cheered, was sometimes moved to tears and overall was bowled over by the quality and range of the works being read. Based on this year’s lineup the audience is in for another treat. Be sure to get there early to secure a seat!

We are blessed in San Miguel with a wealth of talent in all spheres of the arts, as well as in business and philanthropy. The Author’s Sala was founded to highlight the works of writers living in San Miguel as well as those who come here for inspiration, solitude and a creative environment in which to write. 

The “Works in Progress” evening provides an opportunity for both published and unpublished writers to share their output with an audience. The majority of the presenters have, until now, been unpublished. This is your opportunity to discover emerging talents and to say “I heard him/her read from his/her work before s/he was ever published.”

Following is an excerpt from Naked Under Polyester by Alice Sperling:

I am being tested. I knew that from the beginning. As a bit of a control freak, something I would rather interpret as being precise, sensed that this trip was going to test my tolerances.

I just didn’t know how soon.

I guess it started in the planning phase when my travel companion dropped out. I had to wrap my mind around going it alone at this age. I dealt with it and came up OK. If I hadn’t been living in SMA I don’t believe I could have done this. It gave me the courage to explore and push my own comfort zone. But having conquered my innate sense of shyness, I knew that I would alight OK on every level.

Packing and planning occupied the better part of my life.

Itemizing, arranging and rearranging, washing, ironing and figuring out the lightest number of items required to cover all temperatures and classes of dress from freezing to hot, city to countryside.

The advance was even longer—shots, buying items in Denver not available in Mexico, infrastructure of the house and animal care, transfer of funds, taking a photography workshop, changing batteries in cameras and clocks and booking the free business class air ticket using Delta miles.

So here I am in a very cheap and scary hotel room, sweating and naked, lying on and over polyester wondering what will happen.

I like to travel in a precise, very clean way. I had a manicure two days before leaving, my hair done the day before. My clothes were carefully chosen to present a well-to-do but not rich image to fit into business class: to survive the freakish fluctuations of temperature of plane travel. Tight but not too sexy black pants, short-sleeved cotton white blouse with pretty neckline, layered by a light olive green cashmere sweater, blue crocheted neck piece, black outer jacket in black with purple lining, and a lovely silk and cashmere shawl to drape at neck and shoulders. All looking swell with red hair and blue eyes. Neat gold jewelry. Groomed. Pretty. Comfortable. Carry on with the basics but not too heavy. Main bag borrow and lighter than my own, tagged with new green wide strap, and matching locks and luggage tags. All in precise order.

Martine picks me up in time, although we need to make a stop to swap out cars before leaving just to be safe. Red flag. The first warning.

1 hour trip to Querétaro done with ease. The direct airporter to Mexico City also needs to be switched out. Flag 2.

Arrive in plenty of time. Almost no other passengers in Aero México business line save a handsome tall American and a very gay Mexican with a cell phone and trailing porter lugging real Vuitton.

I check in, bag only 20 kilos, tagged and marked through to Incheon, Seoul’s airport. It’s a 10 hour flight to Paris. Few people in first class. Being over served. Yummy sea bass with artichokes, too much to drink, Bloody Mary, two glasses of Sauvignon Blanc, an aged tequila, 5 mils of Valium and the same of Ambien. Alarm 3. Then I fear sleeping as I might have overdosed. Shift around and sleep in two hour shifts, drinking endless bottles of water.

Arrive in Paris looking presentable, with 5 hours to roam. People watching so much better here than in Mexico. There the women were over blond and under dressed. Here the same are beautifully scarved and groomed, the men in tailored raincoats, longer hair, adoring eyes.

Buy good chocolate and use the business lounge to check e-mail.

Have my favorite “tartine” (French bread with butter and jam) and cafe creme, spoiled only by excessive smoking in the cafe.

Business class on Air France is a dream. Under populated, the seats recline 180 degrees into pod type structure. Adjustable reading lights come from the side so not as to disturb a neighbor. No worries as I am the only person in my row.

Champagne followed by a rich, uncious foie gras, sided by fig compote and mache, lovely bread, farm butter. The attention to details is superb. Evian water and face tonic and cleanser in the bathroom, Clarins hand lotions. French products on display.


This time I stick with Pernod. No more overdosing. The night sky is exquisite. The stars familiar in unfamiliar positions.
Arrive in Seoul after 11 hours feeling neat and rested. Pilates paid off with stretching exercises in the aisles all but empty. Read most of the New Yorker Winter Fiction issue wishing I could write like Louise Erdrich.


Clear customs at 8 a.m. and wait for my bag. No bag. No bag anywhere.

Have to wait on line and try to talk with someone who not only doesn’t understand me or me him, but he is not even listening.

Need to have the bag forwarded to Saigon if found as I have a reservation there but not in Seoul. The clothes I have on are not sufficient to handle the cold Korean weather. Feeling shaky and unable to process the ATM correctly, am informed by the machine to contact my bank. Now no luggage and a debit card that can’t be used. Withdraw money using a different card.

After much asking find the bus to Insadong, a recommended location from a casual conversation at the hairdressers.

An hour later, not wowed by any passing sights, I alight. My Korean acquaintance says she would never come here save for family.

I am in accord.

Here I am in a cheap hotel room, the kind of place that hands out two toothbrushes on check in. It is freezing outside and overheated in here. A naked room save a large bed and cheap polyester comforter, giving me none. No top sheet. Me naked seeing my middle aged self reflected in the mirrors along with a cheap tray of grooming products and condoms thoughtfully provided awaiting use.

I might be the only person here.

I walk around until I can’t stand the cold any longer. It kills my desire to explore. Eat lunch at a Korean tea house. Huge array of uninteresting food mostly salted and pickled. I return to the streets but unable to flight the bone chilling cold return to my room and watch TV and think of my carefully planned suitcase. Channel 2 is porn. Asian couples moving joylessly, no hair or genitals.

I sleep in two hour shifts and awake naked. Really naked.

Towels thin and thread bear, barely adequate to dry. No razor, no deodorant, nails chipping. Life too.

The newly changed batteries of my travel alarm do not work to show the time. Not as planned.

I travel with is quote from Anne Lamont in my wallet-



“Traveling Mercies:

Love the journey

God is with you

Come home safe and sound”



The Author’s Sala Special Series presents short works by local authors. The San Miguel Author’s Sala presents author readings and workshops for writers and aspiring writers. Look for books by local authors in a special section at the tienda in the Biblioteca. For up-to-date information on upcoming events, visit www.sanmiguelauthors.com. 

Wim Coleman to read at the Sala Quetzal


PEN’s “New Voices in Literature” series
Wim Coleman
Fri, May 11, 4pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25


On May 11, the award-winning playwright and poet Wim Coleman performs the first canto of his epic-in-progress, The Comedy of Falstaff.

Wim is a San Miguel author who frequently writes in collaboration with his wife, Pat Perrin. Their recent novels include The Maya Gateway (Windstorm Creative, 2005), a philosophical thriller that mixes digital technology with ancient shamanism. Their work together has also been published in German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese and Spanish editions.

When completed, Wim’s comic epic will follow Shakespeare’s beloved character Sir John Falstaff from the moment of his death on a long journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. In the following interview, Wim’s spouse and frequent collaborator asks him a few questions about what he himself describes as “an aggressively eccentric work.”

P: You and I do most of our writing in collaboration. Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, our work together is almost always in prose, with sometimes a dash of verse thrown in here and there. Why do you feel this urge to take on poetry from time to time?

W: I like what the poet Steven Hind once said: “Poetry is a mediation between feeling and experience, a guiding light, and a demonstration of how language works.” That last phrase especially appeals to me. A big bugaboo that you and I share is the pervasive cultural idea that creativity is all about self-expression. We both believe that creativity is a process of discovery. I think Oscar Wilde said something to the effect that the worst poetry is written out of the best intentions. Certainly, the worst poetry I have read is when writers let their feelings hang out without tackling that intricate interplay between emotions, ideas, and the rigors of language. For me, poetry is the most exacting use that language can be put to. I don’t write it often, but when I do, I always learn something that I can bring back to my prose. That’s part of where discovery comes into it for me. 

P: Why Shakespeare’s Falstaff as a hero for a comic epic?

W: I like Falstaff because he’s one of those literary characters who long ago got loose from his author—and then got loose from the rest of us as well. He’s like Hamlet and Don Quixote that way, completely AWOL from anybody else’s will or agenda, with a mind and consciousness all his own. I like those characters. I like to play with them.

P: The Comedy of Falstaff isn’t much like rest of your poetry, is it? 

W: No. Actually, I feel uneasy about calling it poetry at all. It’s more like doggerel. It’s an attempt to raise doggerel to a new level of staggering silliness and ridiculous ambition. Also, it’s a narrative piece—and I really do love narrative verse, especially epics. Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Metamorphoses, Beowulf, The Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, The Popoh Vuh—I just can’t get enough of that stuff. Byron’s satirical epic Don Juan is a special favorite of mine, and a big influence on Falstaff. I’ve even used Byron’s stanza form, ottava rima, for Falstaff.

P: Why?

W: Mainly because it’s great for telling jokes. The Comedy of Falstaff deals with human destiny, sin and redemption, and the evolution of life and consciousness, so naturally it is meant to be funny. Ottava rima is really tough to write in a language as rhyme-poor as English, but its stanzas can end in a nifty couplet that makes a great punch line—a real laugh-aloud punch line. I see Falstaff as mainly a performance piece—a “cabaret epic” that comes most fully alive when presented aloud and onstage. Laughter is a huge part of what it’s all about. 

P: How much of the whole epic have you got written?

W: I’ve got two whole cantos and enough bits and pieces and fragments for another couple of cantos.

P: Do you know how it will end?

W: Well, back when I started on it, I thought I did. One of my more arrogant and funny ambitions was to turn it into a history of the whole universe, relating the role of consciousness in cosmic evolution. In those days, it seemed possible that the universe would end in a big crunch—a singularity at the end of time and space in which consciousness itself might become infinite. But cosmology has changed a lot since I started writing Falstaff. It now looks like the universe is going to expand forever, and there’s nothing anybody can do to forestall life’s ultimate doom amid infinite wastes of meaninglessness and entropy.

P: So?

W: So it looks like I’m going to have to come up with a different ending.

A Serious Comic
By Vicki Gundrum (Sep. 2, 2005)

And for your loving-to-read pleasure…the Biblioteca Pública has purchased the graphic novel Epileptic, by David B. Epileptic, copyright 2005 by L’Association, Paris, France, which is published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House.

Epileptic is a bold, masterful autobiography of David B.’s life with an epileptic brother. The six-volume graphic novel was originally published in French to international acclaim. This English translation collects all the panels of those six volumes between hard-bound covers.

Named Pierre-François by his parents, David B. tells how he and his older, epileptic brother Jean-Christophe and their sister Florence, grow up in the family home in Orléans, France. The book introduces the children at ages four, five and seven, and their early years are a happy time. At age 11, Jean-Christophe suffers his first epileptic seizure—changing family life forever.

David B. uses many historical references as he depicts his childhood activities: playing with toy soldiers, drawing battle scenes and listening as his parents read and tell stories. He especially enjoys the Bible stories that involve fighting. The historical references span eons in time and hemispheres in space. It takes only until page three to see and read about Cortéz fighting the Indians in Mexico. David B.’s symbolism, depicted both visually and in words, builds toward a metaphor of battles to relate his epileptic brother’s life.

The drawings show wit and verve: When Pierre-François’s parents and brother “make the round of doctors” there is a drawing of 18 doctors holding hands and forming a ring, as in the game of “Ring Around the Rosy,” encircling the patient Jean-Christophe and his parents. The round of doctors—and the concomitant experimental therapies followed by dashed hopes, then anger, and then new hopes with new therapies—make up much of the plot.

Jean-Christophe is drawn in the company of monsters during his younger brother’s dreams—both nightmares and daytime fantasies. The epilepsy takes Jean-Christophe away from his brother, and the illness itself appears as a serpent at the family dining table, coupled with these hand-lettered words:

 “Can we, in fact, get on with our lives? But it’s not our choice to make. When the illness took up residence here it didn’t seek our permission.”

The drawings are fascinating and rich in detail. To rifle through the pages is like watching a slide show too fast, yet catching glimpses of skeletons, goons and soldiers of many lands in intricate armor and costumes. There are Japanese samurai, French legionnaires in the Algerian desert and WWI soldiers in trenches. Also I see mazes, a clown, cryptic and inventive Tarot cards, Anubis, the Egyptian god with a jackal head; a scene like the Magritte painting Empire of Light; and on a single page: “Atlantis, the Knights Templar, extraterrestrials, the secrets of Tibet and Easter Island, the vanished continent of Mu, the Holy Grail, the Cathars and Monségur, Hitler and Vrill Society, the Golden Dawn, the Supérieurs Incommus, the Rosicrucians…”.

The stark black-and-white drawings, the grim tale of an unrelenting illness, the phantasmagorical creatures on the page—all crescendo into a powerful experience for the reader/viewer.

The Comics Journal had this to say about the book: “It is rare to encounter a project this honest and forthright about real human emotions. But saying that [Epileptic] is merely confessional conveys nothing of what makes it so special. David B. has created the most innovative comics project of the decade. And probably also the most important.”

About the artist and author

The book jacket tells us that, “David B. is a founding member of L’Association, a group of French cartoonists who banded together as publishers in 1990 and have revolutionized European comics with their groundbreaking approach to format, subject matter and style.

 He has received many awards, including the French ‘Alph Art award for comics’ excellence in 2000, and he was cited as European Cartoonist of the Year in 1998 by The Comics Journal. He lives in France.”

Other graphic novels

There is also an example of a graphic novel in the Biblioteca Pública’s Sala Infantil: México: historia de un pueblo. It is in fact not a novel but a nonfiction history book about Cinco de Mayo, the battle of 1862—an important time in Mexican history. The book is geared toward children ages 9-12. It is an example of the influence of comics in educational materials, pioneered by the great Mexican political cartoonist Ruis (Eduardo del Rio), whose work led to the factoid cartoon style well known to readers of the “…for Beginners’ books. (Ruis created Marx for Beginners, originally published in 1976 by Pantheon Books.)

While many bibliophiles bemoan the decline of reading as entertainment among the young, please don’t blame the graphic novel. School librarians love the form because young boys read the books, and young boys as a whole are not often found in libraries.

In a strange loop comes the news that work by controversial and famed video game designer American McGee (Doom, American McGee’s Alice, Scrapland and the forthcoming Bad Day LA) will be turned into graphic novels by Cellar Door Publishing. And I pray to the god of reading: Is it too much to ask that the violent-video-game-loving boys who get lured back to reading in the form of graphic novels based on such games could one day pick up a traditional novel or a less violent graphic novel?

I encourage you to pick up a graphic novel sometime. Come to the Biblioteca and give Epileptic a look. If you become enamored of the form, then let the staff know you’d like to see more graphic novels on the shelves. The Book Committee, led by Robin Velte—a former States-based public and school librarian—considers patron requests when buying new books. That’s how the terrific Epileptic got on the shelf in the first place. (You can make a patron request via the suggestions box by the front entrance of the Biblioteca.)


Vicki Gundrum reads and edits books in her San Miguel apartment. You can reach her at vgundrum@excite.com. 

Comics & cartoon confessions

As a little kid I liked the Sunday paper comic strip Nancy by Ernie Bushmiller. It was simple and I understood it. Should I be embarrassed that I read it? Many deride it as being “dumbed down.” As an adult I still like Nancy: I like the surrealism of the rocks. Somewhere along the way I learned that Bushmiller used to get ideas for the strip by looking in Montgomery Ward catalogs. Weird. And I remember appreciating a Mad Magazine spoof of Nancy in which Aunt Fritzie was a brothel madam, Nancy was a prostitute and Sluggo was her pimp.

I never read the superhero comic books of my youth, the widely popular serials put out by DC Comics and Marvel, but that is typical for girls. Yet while my preteen twin was receiving her first “I’m growing up” subscription to Seventeen Magazine, I was still reading Mad. I especially liked the Spy vs. Spy cartoons in which one black-inked spy and a white spy (pen-outlined, no color- or black-fill) endlessly took turns gaining the upper-hand on the other one. Neither spy ever won in the end. 

When young, I liked Astro Boy on the Saturday morning TV cartoon line-up. Astro Boy was based on the Japanese comic Tetsuwan Atom (“Mighty Atom” in English) created by Osamu Tezuka—Japan’s most honored anime (animation) and manga (comics) creator. Manga are usually published in black and white and feature “big-eyed, big-haired characters” and “mecha” (technology such as robots, spaceships and weapons). Astro Boy is a little robot boy, built by Minister of Science Dr. Tenma to replace his son who died in an accident. But when Dr. Tenma realizes the robot boy won’t grow up, he casts him out. Professor Ochanomizu discovers the robot boy, names him “Astro” and teaches him and guides him through many adventures. (To remember the show now reminds me of the story of Edward Scissorhands, which I also liked a lot.) I think today’s Power Puff Girls is the closest descendant of Astro Boy. The PPG show—about three cute, big-eyed, lab accident power-enhanced, crime-fighting girls—is popular among girls in Japan, the US and in Mexico, where the show is called “Las Chicas Súper Poderosas.”

I also liked Johnny Quest. Actually, I had a crush on the character of Johnny Quest, even though he was a cartoon. I wanted him and his life: a professor parent, world travel, an interracial group of friends and acquaintances and a dog. And I know I watched Batman on TV but after the first Pow! and Blam! I found it boring and had to turn it off. Today, I still enjoy watching The Simpsons on TV with my nephew—and it is funny in book form, too.

And now I read graphic novels. V.G.