Authors’ Sala events for November
By Carol Lopes

Authors’ Sala
Mon, Nov 5, 5pm
Posada de San Francisco
Plaza Principal 2
Crnr Hidalgo & San Francisco
50 pesos

November’s Authors’ Sala presents Lynette Seator and Stephanie Bennett Vogt,

two interesting local authors whose themes range from poetry derived from working in a men’s prison to the psychological effects of clearing our clutter. We hope to see you there.

Lynette Seator

Returned from wanderings in other parts, Lynette Seator is glad to be back and excited about doing a reading for the Authors’ Sala. Her new collection Flowers and Dust is a work in progress as she continues to absorb the life she is living in Mexico, her home for the last five years. San Miguel was a new beginning, as was her decision to write poems. Lynette says, “Scholarly writing is a closed airless room. While I had a great deal of satisfaction teaching in a small liberal arts college and doing research in Spanish literature and Women’s Studies and publishing articles on great writers including Calderón de la Barca, Miguel de Unamuno, Alfonso Sastre, Camilo José Cela and María Luisa Bombal, it seemed to me that it was time to extricate myself from footnotes and do what was suddenly more compelling— write poems. They came in a rush and it took a while to learn how, in the words of Virginia Woolf, to uncover ‘diamonds in the dust-bin.’”

She also will read selected poems from her published collections, After the Light and Behind the Wall Poems. The first work is “her life story,” the second, her impressions from conducting poetry workshops in a men’s prison over a period of eight years. In the interim between her retirement as the Pixley Professor of Humanities at Illinois College and her move to Mexico in 1991, Seator organized an interdisciplinary symposium in Moscow, New Understandings of the Experience of Women, and later edited a collection of essays published by Mellon Press, Changing Lives of Russian Women: Conversations and Contentions.

Stephanie Bennett Vogt, M.A.

Stephanie is New England’s leading expert in the field of space clearing. She quit a successful 20-year teaching career in 1996 and devoted a decade to the study of clutter and its effects on people. Twice certified by internationally renowned authorities Karen Kingston and Eric Dowsett, she founded Space Clear, a private practice dedicated to bringing homes and their occupants back into balance. Stephanie’s new book, Your Spacious Self: Clear Your Clutter and Discover Who You Are, on which her talk is based, offers a fresh approach to clearing that is radical in its message and elegant in its simplicity. Born and raised in Mexico City, with a home in San Miguel, Stephanie resides in Concord, Massachusetts with her husband and teenage daughter. For more information visit: www.spaceclear.com. 

Word Watch
By Bill Gallacher

ayuntamiento (noun m.) I used to wonder about the identity of the ubiquitous H. Ayuntamiento. His name seemed to be on vehicles everywhere: San Miguel, Guanajuato and Querétaro. Hector? Hugo? Herberto? Some bigwig, obviously. None of the above, as it turns out. El ayuntamiento is the word for town hall, or municipal administration. And the “H” stands for honorable. So what is so honorable about our local government that merits such personification and deference? Answer? Nobody seems to know.

banqueta (noun f.) In Mexico, a sidewalk. If banquet is required, the gender and final letter has to change.....el banquete. In the unlikely event that you attended a banquet on the sidewalk, the expression would be..... asistí a un banquete en la banqueta. The verb asistir has its own peculiarities.

colaborador (noun m.) This word has none of the negative connotations that its cognate in English conjures up. In supermarkets like Gigante or Costco, for example, you may have come across pictures of el colaborador del mes, an expression that corresponds quite nicely with our “employee-of-the-month,” but can’t help amusing most English speakers, much to the confusion of our Hispanic brethren. During World War II in Europe, the collaborator of the month was often clandestinely executed, and the odium of those times contaminates the word to this day.

Bill Gallacher is compiling a dictionary of Spanish words and phrases potentially confusing to English speakers. Selections will appear as a bi-weekly column in Atención. 







Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

Five more contemporary novels

A book ought to be an ice pick to break up the frozen sea within us.
—Franz Kafka

Here are five more novels published in the new century that I enjoyed. They are all different, from a charming story about a boy who investigates a dog’s murder, to another boy who wants to become a terrorist, to a boy whose sister investigates his murder; settings from Mississippi to New York City to England, from a first novel to a prolific writer and everything in between. 

All of the books mentioned in this week’s column are available at the library.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon, 2003. A first novel by an English author, this was a Whitbread Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book. Haddon introduces us to Christopher Boone, an unusual and likeable narrator who investigates the curious incident of the dog. Despite the opening paragraph quoted below, it’s not a gruesome story.

First paragraph: “It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’s house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.”

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon, 2000. I was drawn to read this novel after Nora Ephron raved about it in I Feel Bad About My Neck. I loved every minute of this book, with its two engaging protagonists and their profession— writing comic characters in the 1940s when that medium became popular. They invent the Escapist, the Monitor and Luna Moth. I want to read more of Chabon’s work, including his latest, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.

From the first paragraph: “In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. ‘To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Harry Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing,’ he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal. ‘You weren’t the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini’s first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called ‘Metamorphosis.’ It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation.’”

The Little Friend, Donna Tartt, 2002. I was impressed with Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, and looked forward to her new one, which won the W.H. Smith Literary Award and was short-listed for the Orange Prize. It doesn’t disappoint. Twelve-year-old Harriet Cleve decides to find out who murdered her brother a dozen years before, aided by her faithful friend Hely. I’ve encountered few heroines as engaging as Harriet. And what a first line!

First paragraph: “For the rest of her life, Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her son’s death because she had decided to have the Mother’s Day dinner at six in the evening instead of noon, after church, which is when the Cleves usually had it. Dissatisfaction had been expressed by the elder Cleves at the new arrangement; and while this mainly had to do with suspicion of innovation, on principle, Charlotte felt that she should have paid attention to the undercurrent of grumbling, that it had been a slight but ominous warning of what was to come; a warning which, though obscure even in hindsight, was perhaps as good as any we can ever hope to receive in this life.”

Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris, 2007. This funny, poignant book is about a Chicago ad agency in hard economic times. It looks at our relationships with people at work. Everyone is worried about “walking Spanish down the hall,” a phrase from a Tom Waits song about an execution, agency-speak for getting laid off. As Geoff Dyer says on the dust jacket, “It almost made me wish I had a job.”

First paragraph: “We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us like most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day.”

Terrorist, John Updike, 2006. Ahmad Ashmaway Mulloy is the teenaged son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father he never knew. He spurns the materialistic life he sees around him in his New Jersey high school and longs to devote himself to God. I’ve never been a fan of Updike but I found this a powerful book, different from anything he’s written.

First paragraph: “‘Devils,’ Ahmad thinks. ‘These devils seek to take away my God.’ All day long, at Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies and alluring hair. Their bare bellies, adorned with shining navel studs and low-down purple tattoos, ask, What else is there to see? Boys strut and saunter along and look dead-eyed, indicating with their edgy killer gestures and careless scornful laughs that this world is all there is—a noisy varnished hall lined with metal lockers and having at its end a blank wall desecrated by graffiti and roller-painted over so often it feels to be coming closer by millimeters.”

Next, November’s topic is nonfiction. If you’ve read something good in this category and would like to share it with San Miguel, please email me at marciabookfever@hotmail.com. Include the title, author, date copyrighted, a few lines about the book and a short quote, usually the first paragraph or so. Happy reading.

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública.