coldhearted scientist وداد

4 – Grounding object

3 – Deep breathing

2 – Concentrating on pleasant sensations

1 – Experiencing the end of sensory experiences

While doing these things you follow a Mediterranean diet and make your bed every morning.

Axé.

I was going to do 20th and 21st centuries only, although my colleague thinks I could give snippets of things like the Periquillo sarniento. I’m not convinced and I have now come upon ISP’s dissertation, which turns out to have covered 1917 to 2000. It resembles my idea in some ways. My list had:

[Azuela Los de abajo and pieces of Reed’s Insurgent Mexico, and corridos]
Vasconcelos LRC
Usigli El gesticulador
Rulfo Nos han dado la tierra
Castellanos Balún Canán
Pacheco Las batallas en el desierto
Poniatowska Terremoto
Berman Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda
Herrera La transmigración de los cuerpos [and narcocorridos]

Of course this leaves out Fuentes (La frontera de cristal, for instance, or earlier work), Paz (and Posdata talks about Tlatelolco), Revueltas, Mastretta, and many more — including Daniel Sada who I’d really like to read.

I could call the course SUAVE PATRIA (López Velarde) and it would be a BOLSHEVIK SUPER-POEM (Maples Arce).

Axé.

Here is a very good article critiquing contact theory.

Here is Martí on New York.

Here is Posternak.

Lagniappe: Here is a book on Lorca I should get from ILL. Here is a review of it.

In my paper: Sommer is heavily under the influence of happy mestizaje theory (which has the flaws of contact theory, inter alia). 90s multiculturalism in US promoted both of these and in that way echoed some of Bolívar and Martí, or some famous phrases from them at least. But the actual 19th century is more complex and contradictory, less triumphant, than Sommer’s narrative suggests. These points have been made already but it is worth gathering them together.

This paper is on the dysfunctional family (cf. the families in crisis thesis) — families that disappear the nation and do not consolidate it.

* * * I am interested because of the way race works, novels working as strategies to contain democracy and maintain hierarchies [work this out, I had such a brilliant, concise formulation while washing dishes last night and I did not write it down]. Was I thinking about this paper or my other one, when I was washing dishes? * * *

* * * At Angola: everyone was black visiting prisoners on this former plantation, and we were watching cowboys and Indians on the tv, and I thought, what a perfect colonial scene; we have not left the late 19th century, US army subjugating new lands while the people they half liberated, still incarcerated, look on as a kind of fellow American * * *

As lagniappe, let’s look at the MLA 2007 report on FL curricula.

Students say: less is more. If we all watched the same series, we could all talk about it and change groups. The films are too much in conjunction with the series. And we may need more structured grammar review.

More to come on this.

Axé.

Another smart text by Rolando Pérez. This one is about Martí and New York.

One Laura Posternak has written the article I said I would, and then gone on to use it as the first chapter of a thesis.

I will find as many reviews / discussions / critiques of Sommer as I can, and I will reread Ramos’ book. And Posternak is using all the bibliography I should have better control of just to make this small point I am making — unless I do not need to make it so fully.

Axé.