April 25, 2008, Lies and the true story, By Lynette Seator, Literary Week continues at Bellas Artes, Review of Wild & Wonderful, By Kennedy Poyser, A continent and a garden, A review of Arthur Knight’s Misfits Country, By Harry Burrus, Book Fever, By Marcia Loy, More novels of the twenty-first century , Regional librarians meet in Sala Quetzal

Lies and the true story
By Lynette Seator April 25, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Literary Week
Authors’ Sala
Lulu Torbet, Jesús Ibarra
Stan Gray, Barbara Levine
Fri, Apr 25, 4pm
Teatro Santa Ana
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25

The issue of where the truth lies has surfaced in a number of recent scandalous or suspect publishing events. One imaginative author made memoir a hot topic. When David Frey gave up trying to sell A Million Little Pieces as a novel and promoted it as a memoir, bingo, he found a publisher. After it hit the bestseller list, his story was found to be riddled with lies and gross exaggerations, and he came under fierce attack. When Oprah called him on the carpet after she had innocently promoted his “inspiring” story, she, as one journalist termed it, “skinned, gutted, and filleted him, basted him with vitriol, and baked him in a 10,000º oven for one hour.” Recently, a publisher had to pulp the entire print run of a purported memoir that was discovered to be entirely fictitious.

Memoir claims to be a telling of events from one’s own history, but history itself, once considered infallible or at least beholden to facts, has recently gotten a bad rap from many sources. “Dismiss me from the falsehood and impossibility of history, and deliver me over to the reality of romance,” William Godwin begged in Of History and Romance in 1797. He goes on to say: “Nothing is more uncertain, more contradictory, more unsatisfactory than the evidence of facts.” Thus is a case made for fiction as the most reliable version of the past. In search of the truth? Read a novel, and find out what life was really like way back then, or in Afghanistan today. The Spanish essayist and novelist, Miguel de Unamuno, speaks of the novel as intra-historia, what you might call “the inside story”: an intimate account of lives that don’t make it into the history books or the headlines, yet shed a broader light on the subject at hand.

Actually history, traditionally viewed as a researched run-down on the doings of powerful men and their battles, began to change in the past century, and the women’s movement of the sixties and seventies played a key role in making that change. Where were the women in all those volumes of recorded history through the centuries, and what were they doing? In fact, it was the re-visioning of history from the more personal standpoint of those formerly considered inconsequential that brought memoir to the fore as a popular genre.

To what extent can we call the memoirist to account for embellishing his or

her own story? And what about the biographer? Or the journalist? Shall we stop buying newspapers and throw away the history books in favor of the novel? Please come to hear what the panelists have to say and jump in yourself to what promises to be a lively discussion.

Panelists

Artist and photographer Lulu Torbet ran a graphic design studio in Manhattan before being lured into the writing trade by an editor who picked her up on the street (as she was selling her wares), desperate for a book on macramé.

She moved from writing craft books under her own name to ghostwriting, mainly for psychologists, and then to ghostwriting memoirs (most recently the memoirs of the last direct descendant of Hernán Cortés), where she ran into some of the issues this panel will discuss. More information and a complete book list can be found at www.lauratorbet.com).

Jesús Ibarra, Atención San Miguel’s reporter for two and a half years, is also a biographer of Mexican cinema stars. From 2003 to 2005, he researched and wrote Los Bracho: tres generaciones de cine mexicano, published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), a multi-biography of five members of the Bracho family, involved in Mexican cinema since the thirties. He is currently writing the biography of Cuban-born actress Carmen Montejo, who made her career during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema.

Stan Gray has been a Peace Corps volunteer, manager of a professional opera company, psychotherapist and stockbroker. He has been active in the San Miguel theater community as both actor and director.

Barbara Levine runs project b, an international exhibition and curatorial services company. She was formerly Director of Exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Deputy Director of the Contemporary Jewish Museum.

Levine is the author of Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing The American Photo Album (2006, Princeton Architectural Press) and Around The World: The Grand Tour in Photo Albums (2008, Princeton Architectural Press).

Moderator Lynette Seator is a Professor Emerita of Spanish literature, scholar and a poet. Two books of her poetry, After the Light and Behind the Wall Poems will, she hopes, soon be followed by Flowers and Dust. In 1992, Seator organized a symposium in Moscow and edited Changing Lives of Russian Women: Conversations and Contentions (Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, 1998). In 1992 and 1974, she received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the Illinois Arts Council in 1995.

This panel discussion represents the Authors’ Sala contribution to Semana Literaria, a series of events organized by Víctor Sahuatoba to commemorate the shared date of death of Cervantes and Shakespeare.

Literary Week continues at Bellas Artes

The Second Annual Week of Language and Literature continues at Bellas Artes, as part of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Biblioteca Pública.

From April 19–21, in conjuction with the bookstore EDUCAL, books by Octavio Paz will be on exhibit. A video of the reading of the poem “Stone of the Sun,” by Emilio Cardenas will be shown April 20, at 12:30 pm and on April 21 at noon. On April 25, the talk “History and Literature” will be presented by Ignacio Trejo at 6pm. The final event will be a lecture on April 26 at noon, entitled “Intact Clarity” by Andrea Angel. This lecture will deal with the theme of youth and poetry and is given by and is in coordination with the Hollow Muse and the Space for Independent Creative Proposals.

The director of Bellas Artes invites all youth and adults to attend this Second Annual Week of Language and Literature, for which there is no charge for admission. “For the Cultural Center Ignacio Ramirez, el Nigromante,” stated Ernesto de la Pena Folch, director of CCIREN, “It is a great pleasure to be able to participate in the Second Annual Week of Language and Literature, as part of the festivities organized to celebrate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Biblioteca Pública.”

“For San Miguel, El Charco is a continent and a garden,” declares author Walter L. Meagher. “All is not known of what lives here…. This book is a peek at what we do know and a prompt to learn more.”

The book is Wild & Wonderful: Nature up Close in the Botanical Garden “El Charco del Ingenio,” San Miguel de Allende, a new guide to the 100-hectare facility written by Meagher with superb photographs by Wayne Colony.

The book “conveys both a sense of place and its environmental wholeness. The beautiful photographs and background biology…enable us to see and appreciate more fully the living, independent ecosystem,” Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson says in the foreword. “Ultimately the living world will be saved by those who care deeply about particular places.” Time magazine selected the professor for its 1995 list of the 25 Most Influential People in America. Two of his 20 books won Pulitzer Prizes.

The seven sections of Wild & Wonderful reflect the three basic areas of El Charco—canyon, wetland and scrubland. The glasslike canyon walls of “welded tuff” were formed long ago by a volcanic ash flow, cut through by millions of years of water flowing from the basin to the east. The wetlands are the extensive meadows on the north side of the presa, home to a great diversity of species and resting place for migratory birds from as far away as Canada. Thirteen small islands at the edge of the presa have been built over the past few years to accommodate the visitors. Scrubland above the meadow is covered by grass, cactus and young Acacia trees.

Each page of the book is a succinct photographic essay on the flowers, birds, butterflies, cacti, grasses, frogs and turtles to be found in the three areas. The last section, on the man-plant relationship, describes healing herbs, deadly nightshade and even how one family makes baskets from reeds similar to those which grow in the arroyo below the presa.

Walter L. Meagher studied botany at the University of Michigan and the Barnes Foundation. He has published papers on Midwest floodplains and Caribbean island vegetation. He contributes regularly to Oxford Magazine, wrote Portrait of a River in 2005 and published the first El Charco flora inventory in 2007.

Wayne Colony earned geology degrees from the University of Washington (BS) and the University of Arizona (MS), with a specialization in volcanology. He taught for 30 years and went far afield for summertime studies—the Galapagos, Mt. St. Helens and Pacific Ocean sea floor volcanism. Taking up nature photography in retirement, he and his wife Susan spent as many as five mornings a week at El Charco inventorying resident and migratory birds. Butterflies and flowering plants naturally followed, until the couple had a magnificent photographic record of the entire botanical garden.

And that’s how this 204-page lavishly produced volume came into being—a good idea backed by hundreds of hours of work over several years, sustained by vision, devotion and talent.

Kennedy Poyser likes to read about wilderness more than experience it.

In his novel Misfits Country, Arthur Knight imaginatively creates a movie within a movie, using the actors of the 47-year-old film The Misfits as characters in his new movie. The new version deals with their dysfunctional relationships.

Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Arthur Miller and John Huston star in Knight’s movie which has an atmosphere and residue of a bygone era; most of their best work (Some Like It Hot, From Here to Eternity, Gone with the Wind, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Death of a Salesman) was done well before The Misfits.

Knight creates an intimate, documentary-style piece, employing cinematic writing that immerses the reader in the day-to-day saga of the fictionalized lives of Marilyn, Clark, Monty, Arthur and John. At times he uses a close-up, allowing the reader entree into the intimate details of the characters’ personal challenges. We feel their angst; we’re told their self-doubts; we taste the martinis, whiskey and champagne they drink; we smell Huston’s nearly constant cigar and feel overwhelmed by the fumes of so many cigarettes smoked by Monty, Arthur and Clark. We pity the pain, suffering and frustration of Marilyn and Monty as they attempt to confront their ever-present demons. We sense Arthur’s awkwardness, his inability to fit in with the others. Clark, much older than his 59 years and in bad health, knows who he is and recognizes he doesn’t have a lot of time left; he looks forward to the birth of his son. John has a picture to complete; he’ll get paid and he can pay his gambling debts. After this film, he’ll mo
ve on to the next one.

Knight racks focus and we tunnel to the arid Nevada landscape, an integral character in his story. The unwavering, searing bright sun forces us to squint. The roasting heat across the salt flats keeps us wiping our faces and necks in an unsuccessful effort to remove constant perspiration.

At other times, Knight utilizes flashbacks for insight into present behavior. He’ll then flash forward, showing the characters pondering their future, wondering where they will be in five or ten years, especially poignant because we know several of them will be dead.

Knight’s Misfits Country, an enticing, surprisingly realistic work of fiction, is a 2008 publication of Tres Picos Press, www.trespicospress.com.

Harry Burrus is a poet, filmmaker, screenwriter, novelist and playwright.

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

More novels of the twenty-first century

The most influential books of fiction repeat, rearrange, and clarify the lessons of life.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

All the books mentioned in this column are in the library.

Falling Man, Don DeLillo, 2007. Don DeLillo specialized in imagining the worst in his previous novels. What better topic for this post-modern author than the unimaginable worst. The novel begins with September 11, 2001, when an attorney walks out of the World Trade Center and heads for his estranged wife’s apartment.

The narrative switches from his point of view to hers in this post-9/11 story of luck and survival.

First paragraph: It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to the faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars.

The Guardians by Ana Castillo, 2007. This remarkable novel features a strong central character, Regina, who’s raising her teenaged nephew, Gabo, in El Paso. They set out to find her brother, Gabo’s father, Rafa, who’s disappeared. A strong cast, an engaging story from the Mexican-American winner of an American Book Award.

Excerpt: I kept Gabo this time around because I want him to finish high school. I don’t care what the authorities say about his legal status. We’ll work it out, I say to Gabo, who, when he was barely walking I changed his diapers, which I also tell him. He’s still embarrassed to be seen in his boxers. That’s okay. I’m embarrassed to be seen in mine, too. Thirty years of being widowed, you better believe I dress for comfort.

Winter’s Bone, Daniel Woodrell, 2006. Another strong main character, another story of a missing father, this time set in the Ozarks. Ree Dolly must find her father before his court date or her family will lose their house. A beautifully written novel of hope and determination.

Excerpt: Snow clouds had replaced the horizon, capped the valley darkly, and chafing wind blew so the hung meat twirled from jigging braches. Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a fluttering yellowed dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again. She stood tall in combat boots, scarce at the waist but plenty through the arms and shoulders, a body made for loping after needs. She smelled the frosty wet in the looming clouds, thought of her shadowed kitchen and lean cupboard, looked to the scant woodpile, shuddered.

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública. She can be reached at marciabookfever@hotmail.com.

Regional librarians meet in Sala Quetzal

The Guanajuato Institute of Culture, through Coordinación Estatal de Biblioteca Púbilicas (State Coordinator of Public Libraries), called all librarians from across the state to a regional meeting of the public library network. These conferences are being held by regions. The region that includes Dolores Hidalgo, San Miguel, Ocampo, Dr. Mora and San Felipe met in the Biblioteca Pública in the Sala Quetzal on April 17.

The main objective of the state coordinator is to facilitate, orient and help in the renovation and updating of the resources on which the state libraries depend. The intention is to optimize service in order to obtain more users and to encourage reading in the State of Guanajuato.

The main point of these conferences is to update and discard books damaged by frequent use, as well as unpopular books. These talks are facilitated by Coordinator Beatriz Gutiérrez Padilla and supervisors Leopoldo Hernandez Moreno and Alfredo Ramirez Chávez. According to Gutiérrez, it is important to offer periodic conferences to keep librarians trained, qualified and prepared to face everyday problems, providing them with interesting subjects to help them in daily work.

These meetings are being offered all around the state, including all communities, municipalities and cities. The talks will be carried out this week in cities such as San Miguel, Celaya, Irapuato, León and Salvatierra.

Guanajuato has 147 public libraries assigned to the State Coordinator of Public Libraries. The recently opened State Central Library in León will coordinate and support the creation of the legal infrastructure as well as establish the Network of Public Libraries all around Guanajuato.

Mexico has a Red Nacional Estatal de Biblioteca Púbilicas (National Network of Public Libraries) where services are provided for outreach and the development and promotion of books and reading. Therefore, it has become necessary to make regional arrangements to develop and strengthen the national network and accordingly the state networks.