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Ana Menéndez. The Last War. NY: Harper Collins, 2009.
ISBN: 9780061724763; ISBN10: 0061724769

Michael Sedano

Can this marriage last?

A few weeks ago I was privileged to attend the "16 x 20," "Duality," and Frida shows at ChimMaya. This visit I made it a point to talk to the owners, Steven Acevedo and Daniel Gonzalez. Gracious hosts, they took time out from the frantic activity surrounding them to give me a tour of the art hanging throughout the store and gallery space. In the course of our conversation, Steven mentioned he heard La Bloga's Monday columnist, Daniel Olivas, has a new novel coming soon, and expressed interest in hosting a reading at ChimMaya when the book comes out. What a happy confluence of events. I get some photos and experience beautiful arte, Daniel gets a marketing contact from one of the hottest arts locales on the East Side of El Lay.

ChimMaya is an easy drive from anywhere in Southern California. South of the Pomona Freeway (60) near Atlantic on Beverly, at 5283 E Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, 90022

Bits and Pieces

In upcoming Fall events, La Bloga friend, author C.M. Mayo, promotes her novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. Venues include Virginia's Fall for the Book Festival in September. In October she heads for Washington DC for the Historical Society of Washington DC, and in November, The Texas Book Festival. Find details both on the novel and the promotional events at Mayo's English language site or su sitio hispanoparlante.

Mayo Trailer Project

"Madam Mayo" seeks links to author book trailers. She notes, " I'm interested in video 'trailers' for books as a genre and am preparing some more detailed notes for the blog, so if any of the writers reading La Bloga would like to send me the URL for their own trailers, I invite them to do so via my website."

Reyna Grande - New Novel, Organizing Latino Book Fair, Panel

La Bloga friend and author of Across a Hundred Mountains Reyna Grande's latest novel, Dancing with Butterflies is

about to reach bookshelves near you. Publisher's Weekly gives it a starred review, promising active interest from booksellers.

La Bloga will be reviewing the work in an upcoming column. In the meantime, you can ask your local bookseller about plans to stock the novel for ready local accessibility.

Reyna is a chief organizer in Los Angeles of the upcoming Edward James Olmos and Latino Literacy Now sponsored Latino Book Fair, Saturday and Sunday, October 10 and 11 on the campus of California State University Los Angeles. For the geographically challenged, this is not the Westwood campus of UCLA, it's the El Sereno Campus of CSULA.

With over 65 great Latina Latino authors, 24 panels, and 12 workshops in Spanish, a main stage and a children's stage, this festival is shaping up to be filled with excitement and insight. This is history in the making. The Latino Book Fair has been a recurring and stellar event for a dozen years across the Southwest. This one promises to be the best ever!

A week before the Latino Book Festival at CSULA, Reyna is chairing a fascinating-sounding panel at the West Hollywood Book Fair. Titled "Chicas, Chicanas, & Latinas: Women in Action", the panel features authors Josefina Lopez, Mary Castillo, Margo Candela and Graciela Limon.

Hit List Hits Pasadena This Week, August 29!

Here is wonderful afternoon news. Some of us older gente have a tough time enduring the late night routines of book release events and author readings. Thank you indie bookseller and Pasadena Califas institution Vroman's Books!

Sat, 08/29/2009 - 3:00pm
Location: Vroman's Bookstore
695 E. Colorado Blvd
Pasadena, California 91101

Group event for Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery - featuring: Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Linda Quinn, and S. Ramos O'Briant

A gripping anthology of short fiction by Latino authors that features an intriguing and unpredictable cast of sleuths, murderers and crime victims.

Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery
ISBN-13: 9781558855434
Published: Arte Publico Press, 03/01/2009

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez. The Husband Habit. NY: St Martin's Press, 2009.
ISBN-10: 0312537042

Michael Sedano

Way back in 1999, the Los Angeles Times ran a review that skewered a comedian and his tired, insulting act. I remember sitting up and taking notice of the writer, thinking to myself, “Self, this writer, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, has a lot of power in her pen, I wonder what kind of fiction she’d write if she ever gets a chance to cut loose?”


In the course of a handful of novels, the writer demonstrated she has a lot going for her. She aligned her work with a popular strategy other writers had pursued to great success, following multiple characters. It worked. Valdes-Rodriguez enjoyed popular success in her Sister Sucias novels, The Dirty Girls Social Club and less so with Dirty Girls On Top, advancing with superb work in Make Him Look Good. In her latest novel, The Husband Habit, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez sows fertile new ground. She’s freed herself of her inner Mary McCarthy and allows one character to take over the novel. And I’m glad she has. With a reservation.

Although readers can depend on a Valdes-Rodriguez novel to bring smiles that brighten even a dismal day, a mélange of characters doesn’t allow much opportunity for a woman to stand on her own feet and show the world of what she’s capable. Ditto the writer, in as much as the group tactic pressures the writer to leave deserving characters ill-developed while sending others into extreme behaviors to wrap up an errant plot.

Thus, shaking off The Group mentality frees the writer to focus upon a singular character, a continuous narrative, and to write the heck out of a novel to the benefit of both the reader and author. This is what The Husband Habit reaps, a better developed central character around whom all the characters and action pivots, and some interesting writing.

Vanessa Duran exercises culinary genius in a fancy Alburquerque restaurant. Clever with quick repartée, she has a solid sense of herself, but refuses to take her own side. The big-name chef she works for steals credit for Vanessa’s creativity. Big sister Larissa bosses Vanessa around as if the latter were not a fully grown adult woman. And Vanessa submits like a good little sister. The worst part of Vanessa’s problem is being gulled by married men, hence the title.

Valdes-Rodriguez opens the novel with a deliciously funny scene. Vanessa, the unknowing “other woman” has flown cross-country to tryst with an internet romance. The vato has money, charm, fancy clothes and an impressive bottle of wine. And a wife with son, who follow from the airport to the tony hotel. Sancha Vanessa and fulano learn they’ve been followed when the irate wife rams her own SUV into the lying philanderer’s fancy car. Again and again and again the betrayed wife slams her vehicle into the Mercedes until cops haul her away. The mortified Vanessa flees to the registration desk and a sympathetic clerk. Hilarity surrounded by the woman’s tragedy.

Vanessa lands back home and resumes a courtship with Bryan, a pastry chef. Another fiasco. This pendejo not only is married with a son, his wife has found out about the affair and is hospitalized after attempting suicide. In the space of the first 40 pages of the novel Vanessa takes a pair of you-didn’t-tell-me-you’re-married gut punches from men she was dating. Sadly, Vanessa’s feeling of betrayal is so profound she blames the wife, telling Vanessa’s good friend Hazel that Bryan is “a lying sack of crap with a depressive and unstable wife.”

Older sister Larissa enjoys a successful academic career. In fact, she’s about to depart for a research jaunt to Morocco. This leaves Vanessa in charge of their aging, bickering, alcoholic parents. Vanessa rightfully senses a new nightmare in the offering. Larissa senses danger in the hunky next door neighbor and extracts a promise from little sister to lay off men for a few months. No rebound dating, especially with the neighbor. Vanessa, overwhelmed at the prospect of spending quality time with her mother and father, meekly agrees.

Then she lays eyes on the neighbor. Vanessa cannot keep her eyes off the he-man’s body. He-man cannot keep his eyes off Vanessa’s legs. But Vanessa holds true to her promise, hence the plot thickens as she resists her feral urges and keeps the neighbor at arm’s distance. Slowly, however, he wears her down with Vanessa's help. He cooks. He knows literature. He finds ways to surprise her with music, knowledge, kindness.

Paul is an interesting man in numerous ways, with a major drawback. He’s military and neither Vanessa nor Larissa want anything to do with this type of person. But Paul is not a tipo. He is a pilot recently returned from Iraq, wounded--Post-Traumatic Stress wounded. He’s fallen hard for Vanessa’s beauty, skill, sincerity. Vanessa’s anti-military blindness deepens his wounds, as if his life choices were entirely of his doing. They’re not, if only Vanessa will provide him an opportunity to explain.

Paul, it develops, has turned against the war. He’s of Vanessa’s opinion, of the futility and mindlessness of an unprovoked invasion. For Vanessa, it’s a theory. For Paul, the knowledge of what he has done in prosecuting the war is one long, sustained gut punch. Bridging the gap between Vanessa’s attitude and Paul’s remorse sends the novel roiling into political territory that adds interest and enlarges the capacity of chica lit to give something beyond a mere beach read. Not that this novel is not a lot of fun. It is.

Valdes-Rodriguez’ antiwar attitudes are not a reason to endorse The Husband Habit, but that hasn’t stopped a cabal of conservative assholes from raking the book over the Amazon coals. The day I looked, Amazon's featured negative review slices and dices at the novel’s strengths with unmeasured sophistry and mean spiritedness. It’s interesting to note the 1- and 2-star (bad) reviews mostly come from anonymous critics who sign with “handles”, whereas 5- and 4-star (great) reviewers generally have the honest courtesy to sign a real-sounding name.

Sophisticated readers who aren’t grinding axes will find excellent writing gives The Husband Habit a stature several steps above typical chica lit titles. This is one of the rewards of Valdes-Rodriguez shedding the group novel in favor of developing a single relationship for a singular character. Certainly there’s ample clowning around and clownish moments in her characters. But the characters can be deadly serious and self-disclosing in disarming ways, as when Paul talks about his hatred for hunting the animals on his family’s ranch:

I liked animals, Vanessa. Alwavs have. I still do. I love 'em. I'll never forget it. I was a little kid, and he took me out here, and he downed a doe, and took me with him to get it. She wasn't dead yet, just there bleeding, you know? She looked right at me. And her baby, that fawn, was standing there, not knowing where to go or what to do. I was sickened by it. I hated it, but you know how it is. You have to suck it up, when you're a boy, right? You gotta play soldiers and cowboys and Indians, you gotta like to shoot stuff, and you gotta play sports, right, or you're not a real boy. And my dad wanted me to learn to hunt, to do this thing that his dad taught him, and that his dad's dad had taught his dad, and so that's what it was like. Like my legacy, and I hated every minute of it, but when you're a kid you don't have the guts or the power to stand up to your dad about something like that, and you think there's something wrong with you.

Lucky Vanessa. True to the template of chica lit, the would-be lover has money. Rich is so much nicer than poor. And, because Vanessa is the center of her novel, Valdes-Rodriguez gets opportunities to paint a complex woman, not the foolish girl who bounces from bed to bed. As in the excursion Vanessa’s thoughts take when driving the open road and her thoughts wander to roadkill:

Brutality and grace, locked in an endless dance. This is how it works, a vile vein woven through all this beauty, life and death tangled together and dependent as inhale to exhale, as sleep to waking, when you are brave enough to look closely and without blinking. Roadkill. Rabbits, coyotes, dogs. Do they never clean the sides of Interstate 25, the road crews? Or do things die here with such frequency that regular removal is not enough to hide the truth of the dance between the modern and the ancient? It wounds her, these dead things. Maybe it was the eyes of that one dog, still open, surprised at the blow, the head disembodied and the rest of the animal spread like paste across the roadway.

What an interesting grammatical paragraph, the appositions. The Husband Habit offers numerous instances where the writer has her way with language. Rich in metaphor, landscape, spiteful character asides, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez has achieved a milestone in her career with this masterly crafted work. And true to her title, Vanessa's in for a huge surprise from Paul she did not see coming, and readers will chortle about. Be prepared to suspend disbelief in that final plot twist.

My one reservation is a quibble with the character’s seeming helplessness, though this more is wrought of the chica lit template, less from the writer’s skill. I’d like so much to observe a strong, powerful woman with guts and judgment. Vanessa’s pal, Hazel, for instance, takes no caca from domineering men. Paul’s mother, like sister Larissa, is an accomplished academic, I bet they kick ass in a man’s world no holds barred. I hope to read such a character in an upcoming novel. The author surely is moving in that direction. The cutesy stuff of comedy makes for fun reading, and that’s its own reward. I think back to the controlled anger and unbridled contempt 1999's Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez unleashed on that clueless sap. He got what he deserved. I think some future Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez character is out there, waiting to get what she deserves, her own novel and powerful self-reliant independent ethos. It's what we deserve.

With every passing of Memorial Day, Chicanos, mexicanos, green-card holders and immigrant Latinos enter the U.S.'s military with hopes for acceptance by American society, driven by their newly adopted patriotism, and with aspirations to grub-stake their own American dream. Unfortunately, along with this comes our sometimes even naïve complicity to use the weapons of war on innocent civilians who are too often dark-skinned peoples not unlike us.

I read a piece this week that affected and impressed me such that I asked and received permission from TomDispatch.com to share parts of it with La Bloga readers. Two weekends after Memorial Day, seems a fitting time to post the following, adapted by Chris Hedges from his just released Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians (Nation Books),
co-authored with Laila al-Arian. (Hedges is former Middle East Bureau Chief of the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute.)

What impressed me most was not only Hedges' strikingly insightful and brutally compassionate analysis of what the Iraq War has done to American soldiers and Iraqi citizens, but more the words of Camilo Mejía, who became the first American veteran of this war to refuse service. (Mejía, originally from Nicaragua, became a permanent resident. In 1995, at age 19, he joined the Army and served nearly 9 years. In 2003 he was sent to Iraq. Mejía applied for a conscientious objector discharge after five months in Iraq, was charged with desertion, and served nine months before being released.)

You may not agree with the views expressed in my opening paragraph, and I am reviewing neither Hedges' nor Mejía's books for you here. You can do that for yourself for the reasons Hedges expresses in his last sentence below. Go here to read Hedges' entire piece or find out more about his book, as well as here to learn more about Mejía and his memoir, Road from ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía. And if you choose, let us know your thoughts. My own thoughts became confused as I read. I couldn't keep from hearing parallels between the attitudes and treatment of the Iraqi people there, and we and our brethren here in the U.S. But maybe that's just me.

Collateral Damage by Chris Hedges [excerpts]

Sgt. Camilo Mejía, who eventually applied while still on active duty to become a conscientious objector, said the ugly side of American racism and chauvinism appeared the moment his unit arrived in the Middle East. Fellow soldiers instantly ridiculed Arab-style toilets because they would be "sh-tting like dogs." The troops around him treated Iraqis, whose language they did not speak and whose culture was alien, little better than animals.

The word "haji" swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in much the same way "gook" was used to debase the Vietnamese and "raghead" is used to belittle those in Afghanistan. [Bloga note: haji is an honorific for those who make the pilgrimage to Mecca.] Soon those around him ridiculed "haji food," "haji homes," and "haji music."

Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked and left to stand terrified for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse. "I experienced horrible confusion," Mejía remembered, "not knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what would happen to me if I did anything to help them."

These scenes of abuse, which began immediately after the American invasion, were little more than collective acts of sadism. Mejía watched, not daring to intervene yet increasingly disgusted at the treatment of Iraqi civilians. He saw how the callous and unchecked abuse of power first led to alienation among Iraqis and spawned a raw hatred of the occupation forces. When Army units raided homes, the soldiers burst in on frightened families, forced them to huddle in the corners at gunpoint, and helped themselves to food and items in the house.

"After we arrested drivers," he recalled, "we would choose whichever vehicles we liked, fuel them from confiscated jerry cans, and conduct undercover presence patrols in the impounded cars.

"But to this day I cannot find a single good answer as to why I stood by idly during the abuse of those prisoners except, of course, my own cowardice," he also noted.

Iraqi families were routinely fired upon for getting too close to checkpoints, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a .50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son. Soldiers shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold alongside the road and then tossed incendiary grenades into the pools to set them ablaze.

"It's fun to shoot sh-t up," a soldier said. Some opened fire on small children throwing rocks. And when improvised explosive devices (IEDS) went off, the troops fired wildly into densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who became, in the callous language of war, "collateral damage."

"We would drive on the wrong side of the highway to reduce the risk of being hit by an IED," Mejía said of the deadly roadside bombs. "This forced oncoming vehicles to move to one side of the road and considerably slowed down the flow of traffic. In order to avoid being held up in traffic jams, where someone could roll a grenade under our trucks, we would simply drive up on sidewalks, running over garbage cans and even hitting civilian vehicles to push them out of the way. Many of the soldiers would laugh and shriek at these tactics."

At one point the unit was surrounded by an angry crowd protesting the occupation. Mejía and his squad opened fire on an Iraqi holding a grenade, riddling the man's body with bullets. Mejía checked his clip afterward and determined that he had fired 11 rounds into the young man. Units, he said, nonchalantly opened fire in crowded neighborhoods with heavy M-240 Bravo machine guns, AT-4 launchers, and Mark 19s, a machine gun that spits out grenades.

"The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us," Mejía said, "led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them."

* * *
Mejía said, regarding the deaths of Iraqis at checkpoints, "This sort of killing of civilians has long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment."

Mejía also watched soldiers from his unit abuse the corpses of Iraqi dead. He related how, in one incident, soldiers laughed as an Iraqi corpse fell from the back of a truck. "Take a picture of me and this motherf---er," said one of the soldiers who had been in Mejía's squad in Third Platoon, putting his arm around the corpse.

The shroud fell away from the body, revealing a young man wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.

"Damn, they really f---ed you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.

The scene, Mejía noted, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins.

The senior officers, protected in heavily fortified compounds, rarely experienced combat. They sent their troops on futile missions in the quest to be awarded Combat Infantry Badges. This recognition, Mejía noted, "was essential to their further progress up the officer ranks."

This pattern meant that "very few high-ranking officers actually got out into the action, and lower-ranking officers were afraid to contradict them when they were wrong." When the badges -- bearing an emblem of a musket with the hammer dropped, resting on top of an oak wreath -- were finally awarded, the commanders brought in Iraqi tailors to sew the badges on the left breast pockets of their desert combat uniforms.

"This was one occasion when our leaders led from the front," Mejía noted bitterly. "They were among the first to visit the tailors to get their little patches of glory sewn next to their hearts."

[Final thoughts from author Hedges]

"Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits -- few people in pulpits have much worth listening to -- but are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must listen to and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a soulless void. They have seen and tasted how war plunges us into perversion, trauma, and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies that have the redemptive power to save us from ourselves." (© 2008 Chris Hedges)

Rudy Ch. Garcia

Michael Sedano

Last week I had the pleasure of reviewing Benjamin Alire Sáenz' Names on a Map. I noted that gente who'd gone through the Draft would form a personal connection with Sáenz' plot involving a community's response to war, and a twin boy's awareness that he'd soon open the mailbox to find his Draft notice waiting. I thought most young readers wouldn't immediately understand those feelings but should read the novel to get a sense of them. All our soldiers today are volunteers. Which doesn't make their shipping out any easier.

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/nationworld/story/333915.html

THE NEWS TRIBUNE. Published: April 13th, 2008 01:00 AM.
Kathy Fendelman tries to comfort her twins, Samantha and Benjamin, 9, on Saturday after saying goodbye to their father, 1st Sgt. Barton Fendelman. He was leaving Philadelphia for eventual deployment to Iraq. The soldier is a member of the 304th Civil Affairs Brigade. It will be his second tour of duty in Iraq.

---------------------------

I look at this photo and what I see is how strong that wife is. And my heart goes out to her. The kids, twins, are completely overcome at the grief of parting. Their dad, a First Sergeant--a really high position in the Army, there are only two ranks higher for EM (non-officers)--is shipping out for Iraq. Look at that woman's face. She's holding it in as much as she can, but you know she's giving in to her worst fears. What happens to a guy who's going into the invasion zone? Death isn't the fear--everyone dies. It's being blown to bits by a roadside bomb; it's thoughts of disability--how many people does she know who went off to that country only to come home without a mind, without a pair of legs, missing an arm or an eye? Maybe Top--that's what all First Sergeants are called, "Top"--will come home confined to a wheelchair, or bounce in and out of mental institutions for the rest of their "til death do us part" lives. But she has to be strong.

Then my thoughts shoot back to Fall, 1968.

My wife Barbara and I were married in August 1968. We were incredibly happy. Still are--this August it will be 40 years. But at that time, she didn't understand what I understood. Only a matter of time and I'd be heading off to some uncertain future, like the one captured in that news photo.

One day Barbara and I were on our way to a fun day at the Santa Barbara arbortetum, a lovely peaceful place. And it was free, all the more attractive because we were stone cold poor. Graduate students. From the front porch I see the mail has arrived. Barbara says "leave it 'til we get back." Something told me it was the day. I had to open that mailbox.

October 1968. I open the mailbox and see that brown manila envelope I knew would come. Richard Nixon has ordered me to report before Thanksgiving day.  This is why, every Thanksgiving, I play Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" the whole day. We played that song that November 1968 and filled the room with laughter. She laughing bitterly about Arlo's beating the draft singing that silly song, me laughing hysterically at the irony. I couldn't beat it. I was on my way and there wasn't a god-damned thing I could do about it. I was gone. Punto final. What a wretched Thanksgiving Day that was, but our friends the Greelis' shared it with us and we all put on happy faces and enjoyed one another's company.

I managed to delay induction until January 1969. The morning Barbara took me to the Santa Barbara Greyhound Bus station--really just a parking lot in the middle of town--she dressed in her best outfit, wore her brave smile and kept her head high as she drove me into town from Isla Vista.

It was one of those grey, drizzly Santa Barbara January mornings. (I tell everyone you can still see my heelprints etched into the sidewalk where they had to drag me onto the bus, but that's a fanciful tale. I went willingly.) A whole bunch of people like us had gathered to board the bus, to bid farewell to their soon-to-be-soldiers. Who knew what would happen to us in the next few years?

I waited until the final call to present my papers, lined up and boarded the bus. I found a seat and leaned toward the window where Barbara's anxious eyes finally spotted me through the darkly tinted glass. She smiled and waved. I smiled and waved. Her lips moved, "I Love you." My lips moved, "I love you." She held her head high. The driver gunned the engine. In the instant the bus lurched toward the street, Barbara buried her face in her hands. That's how she was standing when I lost sight of her, the Greyhound turning right onto the road that would take us to the Induction Center on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. We were on our way.

Please join me in wishing that family in the photo all the best. Parting is not a sweet sorrow. My heart goes out to that woman because I can only imagine what it must have been like for Barbara back on January 15, 1969.

In under two hours, the bus is in LA. Poke. Prod. Test. Move. No "Group W" bench, no singing that silly song. Pledge allegiance and swear to defend. Another bus ride. We pass through Santa Barbara in the dead of night and keep going, putting distance between ourselves and home. Ft. Ord in the pre-dawn stillness, following orders: "Stand on your number and shut the fuck up."

-------------
Poetry Reading in Chicago by Chicana Chicano Poets Lorna Dee Cervantes and Rigoberto Gonzalez

Lisa Alvarado gave a heads-up on this event recently. Tempus has fugit-ted and it's time to carpe the diem for this Palabra Pura in the city of the big shoulders. 

apostrophe to the recently dead

in iraq.
no one held you
cheek to cheek in comforting arms.
you didn't wait for that poetic right time
when it's ok to let go,
your family reconciled to separation,
your absence,
their emptiness.
bring it on.
your after death comes after lies
lie after lie after lie after life.
let someone else's loved ones
die,
let someone else's loved ones fight for
freedom,
let someone else's lives disappear for
lies.
let someone else's children volunteer.
it's all right ma, the songster sang,
i'm only dying.
it's not all right.
not all right.
not.

©Michael Sedano

*Foto ©2005, the night we mourned our 2000th dead U.S. soldier and read names of dead civilians who got in our way. Now the counts grow from 4000 up. On the United States side. Uncounted dead, maimed, orphaned on the other side. They did not go gentle. Support our troops--bring them home.



QEPD raúlrsalinas. I shot this photo at the 1974 Flor Y Canto held at the University of Southern California. Next week I plan to have more of these historic images cleaned up and posted at the Flor Y Canto page at readraza.com. I'll include a photo of a fellow wearing a carpa that sounds just like this reminiscence Juan Felipe Herrera wrote, in his eulogy for salinas, "i sat in the center row, dressed in a tzotzil tunic i had brought back from chiapas in ‘70". Dang, raza, we were so young back then, que no?


La Bloga encourages your observations and comments. Please, do. We welcome guest columnists. If you have an idea you'd like to explore with us, or something finished and ready to go, please let a La Bloga bloguera or bloguera know by leaving a comment, or click here to email La Bloga's blogmeister.

I've written a new poem. Here it is:

Though others may be fair
Fabulous, free and fine
I love being a bear

My life is without care
No finer life than mine
Though others may be fair

I no longer grump and glare
Instead I sing and shine
I love being a bear

From my stuffing to my hair
I feel simply divine
Though others may be fair

Yes you may stop and stare
Wondering why I do not whine
I love being a bear.

If you're wondering about the form, this poem is a villanelle. The structure of the form is based around the first and third lines of the opening stanza, which form the essence of the poem and are each repeated as the concluding lines of the other four stanzas.

If you want to read some of the other poems I've written, I have previously tried:
A triolet
An acrostic
A diamante
An abbreviated haiku
An a haiku

Writing poetry is fun, and good for the spirit. You should try it some time.

I’ve written another poem, again all about ME. Here it is:

I used to sit upon my shelf
Quiet and alone
Preferring to keep to myself
I used to sit upon my shelf
It wasn’t so good for my health
To sit and moan and groan
I used to sit upon my shelf
Quiet and alone


This one is a triolet, which is a French poetry form. You might have spotted the pattern. In a triolet the first line is repeated on lines four and seven, and the second line is repeated in line eight. Lines three and four rhyme with line one, and line six rhymes with line two.

Have you written a poem lately? If not, why not write a triolet? There’s a wonderful article with a better explanation and some more examples here.