February 8, 2008, Folding paper cranes for peace, What ''The Dead'' can teach us about life, By Glenda Robinson, The yoga of relationships, By Joseph Dispenza, San Miguel Writers’ Conference, Laura Fraser: A talk about writing, By Eva Hunter, Book Fever, By Marcia Loy

Folding paper cranes for peace
February 8, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Lecture Series
PEN Writers Aloud
Leonard Bird
Thurs, Feb 14, 4pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
50 pesos

Between 1951 and 1962 the Atomic Energy Commission triggered some one hundred atmospheric detonations of nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site. US military troops participated in these tests and were exposed to high doses of radiation. Among them was a young Marine named Leonard Bird.

In Folding Paper Cranes, Bird juxtaposes his devastating experience of those atomic exercises with three visits over his lifetime—one in the 1950s before his Nevada assignment, one in 1981, and one in the early 1990s—to the International Park for World Peace in Hiroshima. Among the monuments to tragedy and hope in Hiroshima’s Peace Park stands a statue of Sadako Sasaki holding a crane in her outstretched arms. Sadako was two years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on her city; she was diagnosed with leukemia ten years later. According to popular Japanese belief, folding a thousand paper cranes brings good fortune. Sadako spent the last months of her young life folding hundreds of paper cranes. She folded 644 before she died
. As he journeys from the Geiger counters, radioactive dust, and mushroom clouds of the Nevada desert to the bronze and ivory memorials for the dead in Japan, Bird, himself a survivor of radiation-induced cancer, seeks to make peace with his past and with a future shadowed by nuclear proliferation. His paper cranes are the poetry and prose of this haunting memoir.

Leonard Bird, poet and peace activist, is the author of River of Lost Souls, Though the Priest be Corrupt and, most recently, Folding Paper Cranes: An Atomic Memoir. This will be Bird’s third appearance at the Biblioteca. Poetry aficionados will remember his powerful June reading in the Teatro Santa Ana. Bird will be reading from his new manuscript, Lost and Found.

What “The Dead” can teach us about life
By Glenda Robinson

San Miguel PEN Lecture
The Joys of Joyce: Reading “The Dead”
Austin Briggs
Tue, Feb 12, 6pm
Auditorio Miguel Malo
Bellas Artes
Hernández Macías 75
50 pesos

Film: The Dead
Mon, Feb 11, 5 & 7pm
Teatro Santa Ana
Biblioteca Pública

Last year a lucky group heard Austin Briggs, then Professor Emeritus at Hamilton College, speak about “The Joys of Joyce” during San Miguel’s 2007 PEN lecture series. The irrespressible Briggs never fails to captivate audiences with his wit, warmth and sheer love of life and 2007’s sold-out lecture was no exception..

This year Prof. Briggs returns with a sequel, in which he will talk about “The Dead,” the final short story in Joyce’s Dubliners collection. As a special pre-lecture warm-up, John Huston’s film adaptation of the story will be screened twice the night before.

I recently had a chance to chat with Briggs about his upcoming lecture.

Glenda Robinson: Why did you pick “The Dead” as your focus for this year’s lecture?

Austin Briggs: When John Updike and I were undergrads at Harvard we agreed that this was the greatest story ever written. I don’t know about John, but I’ve never changed my opinion. I am still fascinated by the way its realistic narrative turns into something lyrical, even mystical. The ending is gorgeous prose—poetry, really—which makes a profound and deeply moving statement about life.

GR: You did post-doc work in film at Boston University. So tell me about the film “The Dead.”

AB: This was John Huston’s last project, made when he was dying. His son Tony wrote the screenplay and his daughter Anjelica played the female lead. Houston considered The Dead to be his crowning work and it was nominated for an Academy Award.

GR: Film buffs love this movie. Will you be on hand at the Santa Ana to expound on the film?

AB: Yes...but “expound” sounds a little heavy. “Say a few words” would be more like it...

GR: Does one need to see the film on Monday to enjoy your lecture on Tuesday?

AB: Absolutely not. I will touch on the movie in my talk, but I’ll be focusing on the story as written, not as filmed.

GR: Last September you were feted by colleagues and friends in recognition of your fiftieth year teaching at Hamilton College. What was that like?

AB: Overwhelming! It was a four-day weekend with parties, receptions, a day of symposium papers and a banquet for 100, concluding with tributes from colleagues, former students and college officials. After the banquet, Bunny and I were so pumped up that we couldn’t think of anything better to do than head off to a salsa party thrown by the international students, where we danced until 1:30am, despite the fact that 20 people were due at our house that morning for Sunday breakfast.

I was immensely touched that Joyce friends flew in all the way from California and as far away as Dublin and London. And I was equally touched by all the greetings from former students.

GR: In this age of serial jobs...even serial careers...working in one place for half a century is pretty unusual. What kept you at Hamilton?

AB: Once the ivy got its grip on me, it never let go. A great liberal arts colleage like Hamilton is a wonderful place to be. Far from confining, the relatively small scale allows for a wide range of friendships. Over the years, I’ve gotten close to people of all races and differing sexual persuasions, from Ghana to Romania to Japan, and disciplines from economics to mathematics, sociology and biology. In short, my time at Hamilton has been 50 years of liberal arts education—for me.

Also, I have loved working with first-rate, eager students. When you teach young people how to write, you help them find their own voices. Teaching literature lets you talk with your students about the things that matter deeply to all of us—like love and lust, joy and misery, realty and dream. With a story like “The Dead,” you can help young people confront something all of us live with but are generally fearful to face—death.

GR: You and Bunny recently decided to move to San Miguel full time. Why now?

AB: We started coming to San Miguel 13 years ago for brief winter visits between semesters. Then we started coming for longer periods after I retired from full-time teaching. About a month after the 50-year celebration, I realized that anything further at the college would be an anticlimax and that this was the perfect time to begin a new adventure. So we sold our house in upstate New York, then broke ground for a new home here this January. I’m going to miss teaching undergraduates, but plan to continue my scholarship (I’ll be in France for a Joyce conference in June). And who knows? I may do some teaching here in San Miguel.

GR: We’ll keep our fingers and toes crossed on that one. Is there anything else you want Atencion readers to know?

AB: Yes. They can easily find “The Dead” through Google if they wish to read or reread it, and there are many editions of Dubliners in print. And you might mention that despite its title, “The Dead” is an ultimately uplifting experience.

For more information about San Miguel PEN: lucina.kathmann@gmail.com or 152-0614.

Glenda Robinson was born in California and has had careers in advertising, teaching, and community-building. She lives full-time in San Miguel with her musician-husband Doug and three hounds.

The yoga of relationships
By Joseph Dispenza

San Miguel Authors’ Sala
Leonard Brooks & Wayne Greenhaw
Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad
Fri, Feb 8, 5–7pm
Posada de San Francisco
Plaza Principal 2
50 pesos, includes wine reception

Humanity’s evolution in the arena of personal, social and ecological relationships lags dangerously far behind our potential and our amazing accomplishments in most other fields. This talk will present new frameworks for more viable relationships and address why humans are having trouble being the functional, caring “social animals” we need to become at all levels to survive.

When Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad speak about relationships, you listen. They have been teaching and writing about relationships—and relating to one another—for 33 years. During much of that time, they have written groundbreaking books and seminal articles, and have taught workshops at high-powered personal growth places like the Esalen and Omega Institutes.

“I developed a point of view around yoga,” Kramer said in a recent interview. “My idea was to use yoga for self-exploration. Out of that the notion of yoga as a way of exploring relationships came to Diana.”

Kramer is an internationally recognized yoga adept and innovator, whose unique insights became a basis for the modern American practice of yoga. His many articles on the subject seek to free yoga from its authoritarian roots. His book, The Passionate Mind: A Manual for Living Creatively with One’s Self, embodies his unique approach to what he calls the Yoga of Mind, inviting the reader to look within and expand personal consciousness through self-seeing and self-understanding.

“It is a systems approach to yoga,” said Alstad, “and those principles can be extended by exploring who you are now within the sphere of relationships. Relationships are systems that evolve through exploration.” Alstad is a renowned author and lecturer, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and an early and outspoken feminist; she originated and taught the first Women's Studies courses at Yale and Duke Universities.

Together, Kramer and Alstad wrote The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power (1993), about hidden authoritarianism in our culture and how it corrodes human relationships. The book decodes social and spiritual control, showing how individuals and society manipulate fear and desire to maintain power.

“The ideal of selflessness as an absolute is something we have observed as being detrimental in relationships,” Alstad said. “It fosters an attitude that makes you feel inadequate or guilty and can cause imbalances that lead to resentment and erode passion. Renouncing self-centeredness does not really work in daily life. Not having conditions of unacceptable behavior, for instance, actually may be inviting abuse and enabling it.”

Unconditional love is another ideal that Kramer and Alstad find somewhat suspect. Touted by spiritual guides and spiritual tradition as one of the most essential virtues of a “spiritual” person, trying to practice unconditional love may present an obstacle to protecting oneself in some instances.

“With selflessness,” Kramer said, “people are always eager to tell you how to be more selfless…usually to their benefit, of course.”

“What we need is a dialectal approach, not the authoritarian approach advocated by popular spirituality, which tends to polarize—things are either ‘good’ or ‘evil,’” Alstad said. “The ideal of unconditional love makes an authentic experience of it less likely. Lofty ideals that are unlivable bring dysfunctional relationships instead of viable ones.”

Kramer and Alstad challenge the dualistic split between spirit and matter. They see spirit as embedded in matter. “The spiritual and the mundane have been separated,” Kramer said. “We are interested in a holistic perspective, one is in the other. I don’t have a spirit...I am a spirit. Really spiritual people don’t have spiritual practices, they just are.”

According to Kramer and Alstad, the human relationship to spirit evolves in different epochs. In Buddha’s time, for instance, it was important to frame spirituality as a way of ending suffering. Now the spiritual force moving through us is connection—connecting with each other. One cannot accumulate spirituality. Rather it is an energy that occurs when connecting with others or with something larger than oneself.

This is why the study of relationships has been so important to Kramer and Alstad. “Healthy relationships must value emotional openness as well as protecting boundaries when needed,” Kramer said. “Unless handled awarely, relationships usually break down around issues of control and power. It is necessary for us as a species to create viable ways of dealing with control and self-centeredness in order to connect more deeply.”

Kramer and Alstad are completing work on a new book, Spirituality for Atheists. They will explore these ideas further and offer insights into their work on consciousness expansion and relationships in their Authors’ Sala talk. It promises to be a lively presentation. Their articles and podcasts are at www.JoelDiana.com.

Joseph Dispenza is a co-founder of LifePath in San Miguel. He is the author of God on Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion.

San Miguel Writers’ Conference

Now in its third year, the San Miguel Writers’ Conference is a three-day event featuring best-selling authors, top industry professionals, agents, editors, and publishers, an annual writing contest, a special review of one’s work for eight lucky writers, workshops, panel discussions and more.

Held at the Hotel Real de Minas, from February 22 through 24, the conference features keynote speakers:

Rebecca Walker, bestselling author of Baby Love and Black, White and Jewish

Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wife, Abundance, Four Spirits, Sherlock in Love

Norm Foster, the celebrated Canadian playwright, author of more that 40 plays including Melville Boys and The Love List

Laura Fraser, author of the bestselling memoir, An Italian Affair, and contributor to numerous magazines

And many, many more celebrated presenters. For information and registration:

www.sanmiguelworkshops.com

She calls herself “a journalist, author, writing teacher, traveler, Italophile and long-time San Franciscan.” Laura Fraser is the author of the best-selling travel memoir, An Italian Affair, as well as Losing It, an expose of the diet industry. She has written for Gourmet, MORE, O the Oprah Magazine, Vogue and Glamour--and has been included in select anthologies of Best Food Writing and Best Travel Writing.

Fraser is a keynote speaker for the 2008 San Miguel Writer’s Conference. Here, Eva Hunter, also faculty for the Conference, and Laura Fraser talk about writing.

Eva: Was there a time in your childhood when you “knew” you would be a writer?

Laura: I knew I wanted to be a writer from about third grade, when I started writing stories. My mom had a friend who was a freelance writer, and as soon as I knew that was a profession you could have when you grew up—working for yourself, writing stories—that was what I wanted. After I lived In San Miguel de Allende for a summer when I was nine years old, I came home with lots of things to write about. It opened up a whole new world for me as a child.

Eva: Eating and weight issues run through your work, in both of your books, and in your articles. You compare how North American women look at weight to how European women look at weight and eating. What is the difference, and are you content with your current body image?

Laura: My first book, Losing It, was an exhaustive expose of the diet industry. I always had weight and eating issues, and was unhappy that women are judged so much by their appearance. Learning to eat like an Italian solved my eating problems. Europeans are less focused on the size of the jeans than the pleasure they get from life. Right now I exercise a lot and eat what I please, more or less, and am quite comfortable in my own skin.

Eva: An Italian Affair, which was a New York Times bestselling memoir, is a book about cooking, about a love affair with a married man, about body image in women, about a broken heart, and about an impetuous and impulsive human being. Was there a time between submission and the release of the first edition when you thought, “What have I done? Stop the presses!” After all, Rebecca Walker’s mother, Alice Walker, cut off all communication with Rebecca after Rebecca’s first memoir came out.

Laura: If I’d stopped to think about people’s reactions to my book, I never would have written it. It has been strange when people think they know me because they’ve read my book. They know part of me, but in any memoir, you are a character in your own story, and it’s not you in your entirety. Some people have been judgmental, some people have stalked me, some have told me they fell in love with me, some have wanted me to be their new best friend. That’s all projection. My mom had to read my book twice before she liked it; no parent wants to read about a child’s sex life—that’s normal. I’ve had to detach myself from my work, and establish boundaries with my readers.

Eva: An Italian Affair is different from most memoirs, which are usually written in first person, in that it is written in the second person. (Or “you” voice) You and your editor have stated that you used second person to allow the reader to step into the actual adventure. But to me, there is something else going on here. It sounds like a children’s story or fable—like kids playing fantasy games, i.e. “Okay, you go down the path and there is a dragon there and you don’t know it and he eats you.” Comment?

Laura: One of the reasons I wrote An Italian Affair in the second person was to create the quality of a fairy tale, where the reader can step into the story. I rewrote the whole book in the first person, because the second person was controversial, but it didn’t have the same dreamy tone, so I kept it in the second person. In Germany, they translated it into the third person, because the second person sounds like the command form: “You MUST go to an island! You MUST meet a sexy professor!”

Eva: You say you are “impulsive.” You got some anti-impulsiveness training for this as the focus of your article, “What I Need is a Pause Button” for O, the Oprah Magazine. Fess up: what is your most recent impulsive action where the “pause button” should have been used?

Laura: That would have to be when I decided to buy a house on Calle Loreto 15 minutes after looking at it—it was tiny, a dump, and I didn’t have the money. But I’m hoping it’s one of those instances where my impulsiveness was a case of good, quick judgment. Since I bought the house I’ve found out I was hardly the only person with her eye on it.

Locally based author Eva Hunter is a published nonfiction and fiction writer. Her most recent book is Lord of The Dolls: Voyage in Xochimilco. She teaches writing classes in San Miguel de Allende throughout the year.

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

Book Fever takes the pulse of Doris Kearns Goodwin

Skillful, entertaining and just plain interesting… .Like the best pianists, Goodwin makes the difficult seem easy because she is a fluent technician.

—Peter Delacorte, San Francisco Chronicle

Kearns Goodwin has written biographies of several US presidents. She also wrote a wonderful memoir of growing up as a Brooklyn Dodger Fan. All the books mentioned are in the library.

No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, 1994. This biography of the president and the first lady during wartime America won a Pulitzer Prize. Goodwin portrays the differences between the concerns of Franklin and Eleanor and shows how Mrs. Roosevelt changed the role of the first lady. From her heartbreak at learning of her husband’s affair early in their marriage, she carved out a life and career of her own. It is an intimate look at two of the 20th century’s great American figures.

First Paragraph: On nights filled with tension and concern, Franklin Roosevelt performed a ritual that helped him to fall asleep. He would close his eyes and imagine himself at Hyde Park as a boy, standing with his sled in the snow atop the steep hill that stretched from the south porch of his home to the wooded bluffs of the Hudson River far below. As he accelerated down the hill, he maneuvered each familiar curve with perfect skill until he reached the bottom, whereupon, pulling his sled behind him, he started slowly back up until he reached the top, where he would once more begin his descent. Again and again he replayed this remembered scene in his mind, obliterating his awareness of the shrunken legs inert beneath the sheets, undoing the knowledge that he would never climb a hill or even walk on his own power again. Thus liberating himself from his paralysis through an act of imaginative will, the president of the United States would fall asleep.

Wait Till Next Year, 1997. Most people think I’m a lifelong Cub fan and I probably would have been had blacks been in the major leagues when I was born. But from April 15, 1947 when Jackie Robinson took the field in Brooklyn until the team moved to the West Coast, I was a Dodger fan. My favorite player in the history of the game is still #14, Gil Hodges. I lived in Indiana and Goodwin on Long Island and we both loved the Dodgers. In this memoir, Goodwin recaptures life in the 1950s and the importance of baseball and the Dodgers in her life. I went back to being a Cub fan; she eventually embraced the Boston Red Sox, who have now won two World Series. Some of us are still waiting till next year.

First paragraph: When I was six, my father gave me a bright-red scorebook that opened my heart to the game of baseball. After dinner on long summer nights, he would sit beside me in our small enclosed porch to hear my account of that day’s Brooklyn Dodger game. Night after night he taught me the odd collection of symbols, numbers, and letters that enable a baseball lover to record every action of the game. Our score sheets had blank boxes in which we could draw our own slanted lines in the form of a diamond as we followed players around the bases. Whenever the baserunner’s progress stopped, the line stopped. He instructed me to fill in the unused boxes at the end of each inning with an elaborate checkerboard design which made it absolutely clear who had been the last to bat and who would lead off the next inning. By the time I had mastered the art of scorekeeping, a lasting bond had been forged among my father, baseball, and me.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, 2005. This is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a while. I knew Lincoln was a great president but I had no idea how brilliant he was until I read how, as the newly-elected president, he brought three of the men who opposed him for the nomination into his cabinet: Seward, Chase and Bates. It was a masterstroke.

Excerpt: Abraham Lincoln, William Henry Seward, Salmon Chase and Edward Bates were members of a restless generation of Americans, destined to leave behind the eighteenth-century world of their fathers. Bates, the oldest, was born when George Washington was still president; Seward and Chase during Jefferson’s administration; Lincoln shortly before James Madison took over. Thousands of miles separate their birthplaces in Virginia, New York, New Hampshire, and Kentucky. Nonetheless, social and economic forces shaped their paths with marked similarities. Despite striking differences in station, talent, and temperament, all four aspirants for the Republican nomination left home, journeyed west, studied law, dedicated themselves to public service, joined the Whig Party, developed a reputation or oratorical eloquence, and became staunch opponents of the spread of slavery.

Next week: What biographies and memoirs San Miguel residents have read recently. The following week we’ll take a look at five more and for leap day, take the pulse of David McCullough. Happy reading.