A Working Holiday at Home

Happy Post-Holidays!  Here in the little apartment, the presents are opened, the tree looks wan, James's lasagna was so knockout he won't even tell me what the secret sauce contained, and our sweet son Grey is here until Saturday morning.  

Holidays are wonderful for a writer, especially when you're not traveling or hosting scads of people.  I've finished Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red, two of Auster's three novellas in The New York Trilogy, and The Essential Yoga Sutra.  (My formidable and timely challenge for the holiday season is asteya, no coveting.)  I've loved having the mornings to write every day; I seem to be writing poems and essays.  One new draft essay begins:

    My son stands nude in boots in the snow.
    My son, twenty, stands nude in boots in the snow.
    My son, twenty, stands nude in boots in the snow, a closed black umbrella held vertically over those parts that, shown, would make him a centerfold in the traditional sense of the word, rather than a centerfold in the alternative student newspaper of Oberlin College, where he goes. 
    He has brought copies; it is Christmas; he is home.

It's about, if you can't guess, clashing class assumptions and generational tensions within one very small nuclear family.  Grey's a swell kid; I wouldn't trade him.  But some aspects of one's blithe, carefree children can be rather hard to take when the purchase price of their privilege has come very dear.  Sometimes when he visits--and you've got to understand that the three of us are sharing 600 square feet of living space for two weeks, as we did all summer--my craw feels a bit stretched and poked.

I don't mind the centerfold itself; it's amusing, actually, and he struck a witty pose, and the fact that he brought it home to share with us speaks to a sweet candor he's somehow decided to maintain.  The centerfold just happened to make a handy jumping-off place for some thoughts about parent-child differences.  Love and the grit of irritation.  It goes on for pages and pages; I don't know yet where it will end up. 

He's out and about in Lincoln just now, and I'm here in the apartment working.  This week, I've got to finalize a syllabus for a new course I'm teaching this spring.  It's a brand-new course for both me and UNL, Ethnic Studies 202:  Intro to U.S. Latina/o Studies.  I'm excited about it but feeling a little rushed with the details, especially since my expertise is only within literature, and this course branches out into other fields. 

We're using this crazy, witty, irreverent graphic-format text, Latino USA:  A Cartoon History (especially helpful, I hope, for visual learners) by Ilan Stavans and Lalo Alcaraz, to nail down the big, basic outlines of Latino history, which we'll then nuance with short readings like chapters 7 and 12 of Ronald Takaki's great A Different Mirror:  A History of Multicultural America, Sonia Hernández's essay, “The Legacy of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on Tejanos’ Land” from the Journal of Popular Culture, Guillermo J. Grenier's essay, “The Creation and Maintenance of the Cuban American Exile Ideology,” from the Journal of American Ethnic History, and short readings on Puerto Rican and Dominican history.

We'll use Latino Boom, a really excellent anthology I've already road-tested, to read poetry, stories, essays, and plays by Latino writers, and I think we'll watch a couple of movies; I'm still deciding which.  I'm really hoping that students from all different disciplines will find points of entry that are relevant and exciting to them--that economics majors will end up writing their final papers about--I don't know--the effect of migrant remittances on low-income Latino households in the Caribbean basin, and that poli sci majors will interrogate the effectiveness of building the wall. 

Here are some of the other cool texts we're reading:

Suzanne Oboler, "The Politics of Labeling: Latino/a Cultural Identities of Self and Others," from the journal
    Latin American Perspectives

Lourdes Torres, “Boricua Lesbians: Sexuality, Nationality, and the Politics of Passing,” from Centro

María Elena Cepeda, “Mucho Loco for Ricky Martin; or The Politics of Chronology, Crossover, and Language
    Within the Latin(o) Music Boom,” from Popular Music & Society

chapter 5, "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" (which, of course, advocates nothing of the sort) of the inimitable
    Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza --a book that blew me away and changed my
    life in graduate school, and if you haven't read it, you must.

I'm excited about it all, but it's a lot to juggle and then smoosh into fifteen weeks or so.  We'll see.  This year, UNL has me designing and teaching three brand-new preps, so it's a challenge.  When I was a new junior professor, that kind of hectic course-development pace was standard.  Now I kind of want to rotate, coast a bit, rest on my laurels--but nooooo.  Oh, well.  Here's hoping it keeps me spry.

If you've been following the news stories about the publishing industry's hastening demise, you might be interested in this piece from yesterday's New York Times.  David Streitfeld's "Bargain Hunting, and Feeling Sheepish About It" looks at the newly common practice of buying books at extremely low prices online.  In one example, Streitfeld buys a book online for a quarter:

Neither my local bookstore nor [the publisher] Pantheon--whose parent, Random House, announced this month it would cut costs by reducing five divisions to three--nor the author got a share.  The book looked good as new.

It's so strange to me.  I like bookstores.  I like shopping in them.  I like browsing through things I'd never have encountered otherwise.  I don't love paying $14 for a paperback, but it has always seemed worthwhile, especially when you think about the other things that money gets spent on.  Streitfeld connects the widespread and growing books-for-pennies-online habit to the closing down of not only independent bookstores across the country but also chain stores like Barnes & Noble. 

A world without bookstores.  Ugh.   Authors don't make a great deal of money anyway per book sold, from what I can tell.  Full and indiscreet disclosure:  The Truth Book, which sells in hardcover for an alarming $25, nets me about a buck a copy, and I've managed to publish a grand total of one book in my life.  So I don't write for money, and I don't think most authors do (although that could be naive--I certainly know authors who talk a lot about money).  And while I believe that artists should be compensated like any other laborer, it's not news that it's not a perfect world. 

And so we write out of love, and to reach readers. 

For a writer, it's sad to think of a world where readers couldn't browse through a bookstore, stumble across the spine of your book, and pick it up, a new and serendipitous discovery. 

I *have* been thinking, though, about the great relief it is to have a blog, an Internet presence.  If Mitchell-my-agent, though stellar, can't find a home for either my novel-in-progress or my short story collection (which has, in publishing, kind of the status of a hanger-on sort of relative, since collections don't sell) in this dismal fiscal crisis, I can always publish the novel serially on here.  Why not?  A far, far better thing it is to have 200 enthusiastic readers getting one's book for free than to have no readers at all.  

That sort of electronic access to the world is a strange, wild freedom for writers, akin to having a press in one's living room.  Like Leonard and Virginia at Hogarth House on Paradise Road.  (Paradise Road!) 

Impending demise or not, we're very lucky.