About Ramos's ideas, Adriancommented, "Just write your heart and what happens, happens. Only time and history will tell, if anyone ever gave a rat's tuchas." Since some of you might give a rat's ruchas right now and want to write that GAN---Chicano or otherwise--here are ideas you can incorporate into your manuscript.
 |
| Author Manuel Ramos |
Ramos already described one set: "A novel that beautifully captures the pain and joy and mystery of living in 21st century America, that honestly deals with race and gender and sexual orientation and immigration and militarism and climate change and love and death, with a fresh but obviously American perspective.”
My proposal for a GAN isn't to conflict with or improve on what Ramos described; it's just another one, taken somewhat from different angles.
The Plot - Aggression. To encompass all that's truly American, a GAN's plot should follow the "plot" of American (U.S.) history. In the first half, include the Three Great Desecrations--as someone termed them--of the theft and attempted genocide of the American Natives. Follow that with the enslavement, dehumanization and exploitation of Afro-Americans. Then, the invasion and theft of the Southwest from the Mexican people, and the subsequent lynchings and denial of civil rights and full citizenship.
The plot should include most of the wars begun by the U.S., especially bringing your setting into the future. From the Vietnam War on, there's plenty of material for plenty of wars of aggression chapters. (You'll have to exclude WWII, the war against the more-fascists.) Since you're writing fiction, not history, you'll need to put the setting in the background and link it to your characters' lives, decisions and personalities.
Antagonist - Bad Guys galore. You'll have a problem limiting the number of antagonists, given the hundreds that history has provided us. Pick only the richest cabrones and the cruelest políticos who kept them in power. White people, in general, and simpleminded, pendejo racists don't make for well-developed antagonists. Cheney of course will live long in infamy, but a satanic bad guy who's totally off the deep end of abomination might bore some readers.
 |
| Transformers are not heroes |
Protagonists - heroes for our times. In the spirit of what Ramos suggested, do not go the route of a lone hero, even just a lone Chicana heroine. Or giant robots, either. Instead, create your own Justice League that includes several nationalities and races, both sexes, etc. Something like Tolkien's Fellowship of the Rings, without whitish guys hogging the glory. Yes, it should include a couple of progressive or revolutionary-minded Anglos, for diversity's sake.
Themes - Individualism or ? Avoid the temptation of appealing to Americanized audiences with an Ayn Randish, individualistic, it's-all-about-me, Wild West, lone-heroes-ride-in-to-save-the-day theme. In our times, individualistic heroism is Death, of the species. On the other hand, communal values (without organized religions' prejudices), tribal identity (without empire-building mentality), and self-development minus the competition gene--all that can be drawn on from our common, humane, genetic make-up. You'll just have to nurture it because it won't happen naturally.
 |
| Post-apocalyptic SnowPiercer |
Setting - Apocalyptic or Post? TV, cable and Hollywood have pushed the Bad-Times-to-Come idea over a cliff. So, what do you do? Try a different perspective. Instead of vampires, frozen Earth, devastating plagues or Mean Militias America, make your setting more realistic. What would you and others actually do?
If it's truly the End of Times, courtesy of our political parties, fossil-fuel industries and the 1%, from the beginning of your novel, focus on la familia learning to cope. Friends who learn to help each other. Neighbors who join to defend themselves and keep all the good guys happy. Multinational cooperatives that band together, not just to survive, but to create a new way of life. Maybe one that greatly resembles some old ways of life.
Climax - how good can you make it? I don't want to spoil the ending, so I leave that to your imagination. If you've read Octavia E. Butler's Parable of The Sower series, you will see some of my ideas are influenced by her. Influence, acknowledged. Go find yours.
Now that your GAN is finished, you're not done. You'll have to sign copies--many--and figure out which groups and peoples to donate the money to. If you were to keep it all, you might wind up turning into one of your antagonists.
Buena suerte with your writing,
RudyG(not known as a GANovelist, yet.)
I am a sucker for a great American novel, in particular ones set in college and this kind of fits into both those categories but with a twist. This was originally described to me as Wonderboys meets The Art of Fielding which isn’t necessarily true. Instead imagine a novel like Wonderboys or The Art of Fielding and then imagine what happens to the author and his family forty years later.
A.N. Dyer is the author of Ampersand, a seminal work of American literature set in a college in the 1950s. It was the defining book of his career and is still held in reverence forty years later. A.N. Dyer, Andrew, is now an old man. He has three sons, two with his wife and one from an affair that ended his marriage. Following the death of his oldest and closest friend Andrew, sensing his own imminent mortality, tries to repair his damaged relationship with his sons.
Gilbert treads a fine line throughout the book between satire and metafiction dipping in and out of each almost perfectly. He deftly blurs the lines between fact and fiction in his fictitious world. The way his dissects the publishing industry is wickedly brilliant but the core of the novel is the relationship between fathers and sons and the battles fought over legacy and individualism. The story is narrated by Philipp Topping, the son of Andrew’s recently deceased best friend, who I wouldn’t go as far to say is an unreliable narrator but he definitely has his own biases. The story does take a slightly odd turn but Gilbert keeps everything on the road.
A clever story of fathers and sons and a tragic exploration of the great American novel and it’s aftermath.
Buy the book here…
and Claire has been busily sighing and swooning on your behalf. See her latest booklist of love stories.
Speaking of Claire, she's been pushing me for years to read Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which I'm finally doing. And loving, not least for the following exchange, among the most indelible in American literature:
The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
"Say 'Nevermore,'" said Shadow.
"Fuck you," said the raven. It said nothing else as they went through the woodland together.
Manuel Ramos
PROVOCACIONES: LETTERS FROM THE PRETTIEST GIRL IN ARVIN by RAFAELA G. CASTRO
Last week Daniel Olivas mentioned this book and I wanted to give it a bit more attention. It's a new work from Chusma House, the respected publishing enterprise of Charley Trujillo (Soldados) that offers fine literature sometimes overlooked by readers and reviewers. Here's the announcement from Chusma House about Castro's intriguing book:
"A collection of sensitive essays that depict the lives of a close knit Mexican family living first in Arvin, in the San Joaquin Valley, and later in the San Francisco Bay Area. These insightful, loving, guilt ridden, and at times very sad narratives, reveal the religious, moral, cultural, and ethical values of a young girl raised in the 1950s and 1960s in a Mexican Catholic working class home. We are told stories about a special Mexican mother-daughter relationship; about loving one’s family but needing to leave it; about living in another country and loving it; and about the role of the Peace Corps in the lives of young Americans of the 1960s. The essays cover the years from the late 1930s, when the author’s parents married and came to California from New Mexico, to the 1990s when their lives ended. In between those years their special marriage experienced intense love and intense tragedy."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
"Rafaela G. Castro was born in Bakersfield, California, but has lived most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area. She spent two years in Brazil with the Peace Corps before receiving degrees in English Literature, Library Science, and Folklore from the University of California, Berkeley. She has lectured in Ethnic Bibliography and Chicano Studies at UC Berkeley, and recently retired from the Humanities/Social Sciences department of Shields Library at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Dictionary of Chicano Folklore."
CHILDREN'S STORY WORKSHOP
The Aurora Central Library and the Colorado Authors League presents another workshop in the CAL Speaker Series, "I Wrote (or Have an Idea For) a Children's Story - Now What?" CAL speaker Denise Vega is author of, among others, Click Here (To Find Out How I Survived Seventh Grade) (Little, Brown & Co. Books for Young Readers, 2005) and Build A Burrito (Cartwheel Books, Scholastic, 2008). The workshop takes place at 6:00 p.m., March 29, Aurora Central Library, 14949 E. Alameda Parkway, Aurora, CO. The event is free, but please call 303-739-6626 to reserve a space.
CALL FOR CHILDREN'S LITERACY VOLUNTEERS
Friends of Food For Thought, a children's literacy group that works with low-income youngsters in Denver, is recruiting volunteers and board members.
The organization has been in existence for about 14 years. Find a short description at http://www.ffft.org/
The board usually meets the second Wednesday of the month from noon to two p.m. in Denver.
Volunteers can work on developing participants for and planning book drives, fund-raising, marketing, and events.
For more information, Bonnie F. McCune, Library Community Programs Consultant
WHAT I'M READING NOW
One of the books resting on the small table next to my bed is Murder & Other Acts of Literature, edited by Michele Slung (Book-of-the-Month Club, 1997). I picked up a pristine copy of this short story anthology at Miss Prothero's Books on Santa Fe Drive here in Denver. (Check out this store the next time you are cruising the West Side, visiting the Museo de Las Americas or the art galleries, including CHAC, or grabbing a bite to eat at El Noa Noa or El Taco de Mexico. It's address is 1112 Santa Fe Drive, Denver, CO 80204, 303-572-2260.)
The basic idea for the collection is that the crime fiction was written by authors not necessarily recognized as crime fiction writers. That attracted me immediately -- here was an opportunity to stretch my understanding of several writers. This book provided a chance to read mystery and detective stories by authors I respect but who are not usually associated with those genres. And what a lineup: John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Naguib Mahfouz, Alice Walker, Isak Dinesen, Louisa May Alcott, William Faulkner, Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, Virginia Woolf and fourteen other esteemed and honored writers from around the world. For a reader this type of collection is a treasure, something to linger over while propped against a pillow with a book light the only illumination in an otherwise pitch-dark bedroom. And linger I have, limiting myself to one story each night, no matter how tempted I am to flip the pages from the James Thurber piece to the Rudyard Kipling story.
I haven't finished the book so I can't say which of the stories will turn out to be my favorite, but Mahfouz, García Márquez, Allende and Woolf so far have set a pretty high bar (no surprise, right?) The Mahfouz story, By A Person Unknown, is a troubling, ambiguous detective story centered on a serial killer whose crimes are works of heinous art. Perfect and cold-blooded, the killer appears to have no motive for his cruelty; he leaves absolutely no clues nor does he make any mistakes. He appears seemingly out of nowhere and leaves the scene untouched, undisturbed except for the blood and protruding eyeballs of the strangled victims. The horror mounts and normalcy becomes a lost ideal. The detective, Muhsin, grapples with trying to solve the crime but he realizes that, essentially, such acts of violence can never be solved, they can never be explained. Where is the reality in that?
Miss Forbes's Summer of Happiness by García Márquez is creepy. How's this for an opening line: "When we came back to the house in the afternoon, we found an enormous sea serpent nailed by the neck to the door frame." A classic tale of misdirection, the ending surprises the reader who can only say, "Yeah, that's it."
Monk is quintessential Faulkner, almost Gothic in its tone, while Allende's An Act of Vengeance reads like a Shakespearean tragedy with a depressing but romantic Latina twist.
Ah, nothing like a good murder story to stir up the literary juices. As the editor says in her Foreword: "Murder and Other Acts of Literature implies what we already know, that the pen can be lethal and that the book is indeed a blunt instrument. Thus, when those wielding these weapons are among the world's greatest and most honored literary figures, what more desirable fate than willingly, for a few hours, to allow oneself to become a victim of their artistry?"
MARKETPLACE WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU ABOUT BUSH'S RECENT TRIP THROUGH THE AMERICAS
Joellen Easton of the public radio program Marketplace sent in the following survey that she thought some readers of La Bloga might want to answer. She invites you to answer questions on their website, found here. Here's her message.
What was the impact of President Bush's Americas trip? Was this all political theater? Or do you expect Bush’s trip to affect your life or the lives of other Latinos in the U.S.? What do you expect to happen as a result of the trip? Share your insights with us. The trip highlighted some tensions between the U.S. and its neighbors to the south. Bush and Chavez's dueling tours underscored their ongoing tug-of-war for influence in the region. In Mexico, president Felipe Calderon pressed Bush for U.S. action on comprehensive immigration reform focused on creating jobs, not a fence. What do you make of the Bush visit, and what it means for relations between the U.S. and Latin America?
Joellen Easton
Analyst, Public Insight Journalism
MarketplaceMarketplace Money
American Public Media
Finally, the answer to the question I asked a few weeks ago is Jack Kerouac. If you don't remember the question, you can find it here.
Later.
Well, that was great fun - mockingbirds from California to Tennessee to Baja to the Galapagos! Thanks, Roger.
I just got the audio book of Sissy Spacek reading To Kill a Mockingbird and recommend it whole-heartedly.
That was splendid, thanks.
for 367 more mockingbirds explore this:
http://macaulaylibrary.org
mahvelous resource!
Hi Roger -
Just saw Obama's first 100 days Facebook-style and thought you might like: http://www.slate.com/id/2217225/