Mayra Lazara Dole's Blog - Posts Tagged "literature"
I grew up reading white/Americano stories that I couldn't relate to. Not until I read Sandra Cisneros' A House on Mango Street, did I feel that finally, an author spoke to me and to all my Latina/o brothers and sisters.
Chimamanda Adichie was raised in an academic environment in Nigeria. Her family spoke perfect English and had maids. She started reading at two but never read books that spoke to her. My hope is that one day, equality will exist within the publishing industry and that white people read us, too (recently, as part of an author panel, I found out that 95 percent of all books in the US are written by white authors for a white audience).
Check out Chimamanda's moving story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs2...
Chimamanda Adichie was raised in an academic environment in Nigeria. Her family spoke perfect English and had maids. She started reading at two but never read books that spoke to her. My hope is that one day, equality will exist within the publishing industry and that white people read us, too (recently, as part of an author panel, I found out that 95 percent of all books in the US are written by white authors for a white audience).
Check out Chimamanda's moving story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs2...
In Boston I cut the hair of a 23 year-old bookish Harvard grad with twenty-seven polydactyl cats. On that dark chilly morning she invited me to her Sunday book club potlucks.
Yesterday, I received an email from her and remembered how I stepped into her house with a big pot of frijoles negros under one arm and my Senegalese Djimbe drum in the other. She walked me through a living room decorated with black velvet curtains, couches and arm chairs. Thumping rock music played in the background while she introduced me to folks sipping mojitos —I skipped the alcohol. On the way outdoors, I noticed walls adorned with Hemingway photographs and pictures of his infamous six-toed cats and wondered why she was so enamored of the author.
Outside, we sat on logs and huddled in a circle by a small fire pit.
I sat among two disheveled lit geeks (a guy and a girl), a Republican Nazi with a long beard (no one knew he was Nazi until he spoke of his passion for Hitler and was thrown out of the house), a punk rocker poet/English-teacher-to-be with a Mohawk and tattoos, a preppy female Art History student, an attractive crossed-eyed female English Lit student, an ultra conservative-looking guy with the heart of a hippie who read one historical novel per day, and a gorgeous Jewish girl with fiery long curls and freckles attending BU of which she lovingly called: “Be Jew.”
I was the only Latina and felt a bit insecure and jittery about flexing my intellectual muscles within a group of literary geniuses. I sensed that because of lovely media stereotypes, and lack of authentic Latinos in YA lit, they might have considered me intellectually inept/inferior. Also, regardless of how much I adored literature, my having been a hairstylist/drummer/dancer might have added to the Latina stereotype. I had to give it my all so I could represent and be respected.
That week I read The Sun Also Rises twice, memorized lines verbatim and equipped myself with Hemmingway quotes and anecdotes. The book discussion was engaging and lively and to my surprise I didn’t feel insecure about speaking with what they considered, “a slight Spanish accent.”
During the discussion I threw in facts about Hemmingway, such as that in Cuba he invited a bunch of boys to play ball every day with his son (Hemingway was the pitcher). One of the kids, René Villarreal, grew up and became his (and his wife’s) houseboy and butler at seventeen until age 32. Although I was born a rebel, and am more interested in asking questions than finding answers or believing in a set truth, I didn’t mean to insinuate that Hemingway was gay when I asked, “Could having fallen in love with René, the man (or any other man), and his inability to express his desire, or do anything about it, have led Hemmingway to commit suicide?”
The group's passion for Hemingway’s writing was that of enthusiasts and scholars of his work. They believed Hemmingway was a macho man who attempted suicide after receiving ECT treatments which made him lose bits of his memory and hence ability to write as well as he used to. I knew about ECT because a great deal of ancient LGBT's endured them. The treatments are SUPPOSED to help with depression, mania, guilt and compulsive thoughts and behaviors that can’t be stopped thus the main reasons gays were subjected to it.
Ending your life with a shotgun blast to the head is an extreme act of violence towards self and it seems to reek of self loathing behavior.
It seemed that scholarly and medical opinion had never been attentive to the view that Hemmingway might have lived a guilt-ridden life because he was a repressed and oppressed homo. I might be 100 percent wrong, but back in the day when I read his books and researched him, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was a suffering closeted gay.
Hemmingway once said, “All things truly wicked start from innocence.” He stated, “About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after” and “Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”
In all fairness to Hemingway, I think his suicidal tendency (to put it mildly) was also genetic since his father, siblings, and granddaughter committed suicide too.
In order to prove that Hemmingway was a straight man, the group discussed an affair he’d allegedly had with the married Jane Manson. That cracked me up. I’m always amazed how quickly het folks dismiss someone’s homoness simply because they had an affair with a person of the opposite sex. I asked if they’d never heard of the rumors about Papa and F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald’s wife said her husband and Hemmingway behaved like “lovers.”)
In A Moveable Feast, Hemmingway has a conversation with Gertrude Stein about homosexuality. He seems to accept lesbians but not gay men. Gertrude let him know, “You know nothing about this, Hemingway. You’ve met known criminals and sick people and vicious people. The main thing is that the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink and take drugs, to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy."
Honestly, I think SHE knew nothing about male homosexuality.
Hemingway was obsessed with masculinity and had male gay characters in some of his work, such as:
The Mother of the Queen (about a homo bullfighter).
Across the River and into the Times (has a male homo artist).
I went on to speak about Hemingway's love for Havana’s Barrio Chino (Cuba's Chinatown) and explained how Cuba sold Hemingway to tourists as part of Cuba’s ’50’s image even though they reject the Corporate Capitalist era. http://www.hemingwaysociety.org/justice/ Everything Hemmingway in Cuba has been franchised. I never thought I could become so inspired by Hemingway, but having been surrounded by his fans made all the difference.
Gregory Hemingway, the author’s s transsexual son, a former doctor who went by Gloria Hemingway after a sex change operation, died in jail at 69. He seemed drunk and “charged with indecent exposure and resisting arrest without violence after a park ranger reported a pedestrian with no clothes on” (the officer said she was shoeless and had a dress and heels in her hands).
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conwa...
These days, the Hemmingway's wouldn't be in turmoil for being LGBTQ. Lady Gaga is rumored to be a hermaphrodite and no one gives a flying porcupine: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/200...
If you’re the type of traveler that plans a trip around visiting old authors’ homes, be sure to make a stop at Hemingway’s Key West Home, also known as the “gay capital” of Florida. (I’m just saying…).
Tidbit:
At 28, Hemingway wrote, MEN WITHOUT WOMEN
Yesterday, I received an email from her and remembered how I stepped into her house with a big pot of frijoles negros under one arm and my Senegalese Djimbe drum in the other. She walked me through a living room decorated with black velvet curtains, couches and arm chairs. Thumping rock music played in the background while she introduced me to folks sipping mojitos —I skipped the alcohol. On the way outdoors, I noticed walls adorned with Hemingway photographs and pictures of his infamous six-toed cats and wondered why she was so enamored of the author.
Outside, we sat on logs and huddled in a circle by a small fire pit.
I sat among two disheveled lit geeks (a guy and a girl), a Republican Nazi with a long beard (no one knew he was Nazi until he spoke of his passion for Hitler and was thrown out of the house), a punk rocker poet/English-teacher-to-be with a Mohawk and tattoos, a preppy female Art History student, an attractive crossed-eyed female English Lit student, an ultra conservative-looking guy with the heart of a hippie who read one historical novel per day, and a gorgeous Jewish girl with fiery long curls and freckles attending BU of which she lovingly called: “Be Jew.”
I was the only Latina and felt a bit insecure and jittery about flexing my intellectual muscles within a group of literary geniuses. I sensed that because of lovely media stereotypes, and lack of authentic Latinos in YA lit, they might have considered me intellectually inept/inferior. Also, regardless of how much I adored literature, my having been a hairstylist/drummer/dancer might have added to the Latina stereotype. I had to give it my all so I could represent and be respected.
That week I read The Sun Also Rises twice, memorized lines verbatim and equipped myself with Hemmingway quotes and anecdotes. The book discussion was engaging and lively and to my surprise I didn’t feel insecure about speaking with what they considered, “a slight Spanish accent.”
During the discussion I threw in facts about Hemmingway, such as that in Cuba he invited a bunch of boys to play ball every day with his son (Hemingway was the pitcher). One of the kids, René Villarreal, grew up and became his (and his wife’s) houseboy and butler at seventeen until age 32. Although I was born a rebel, and am more interested in asking questions than finding answers or believing in a set truth, I didn’t mean to insinuate that Hemingway was gay when I asked, “Could having fallen in love with René, the man (or any other man), and his inability to express his desire, or do anything about it, have led Hemmingway to commit suicide?”
The group's passion for Hemingway’s writing was that of enthusiasts and scholars of his work. They believed Hemmingway was a macho man who attempted suicide after receiving ECT treatments which made him lose bits of his memory and hence ability to write as well as he used to. I knew about ECT because a great deal of ancient LGBT's endured them. The treatments are SUPPOSED to help with depression, mania, guilt and compulsive thoughts and behaviors that can’t be stopped thus the main reasons gays were subjected to it.
Ending your life with a shotgun blast to the head is an extreme act of violence towards self and it seems to reek of self loathing behavior.
It seemed that scholarly and medical opinion had never been attentive to the view that Hemmingway might have lived a guilt-ridden life because he was a repressed and oppressed homo. I might be 100 percent wrong, but back in the day when I read his books and researched him, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was a suffering closeted gay.
Hemmingway once said, “All things truly wicked start from innocence.” He stated, “About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after” and “Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”
In all fairness to Hemingway, I think his suicidal tendency (to put it mildly) was also genetic since his father, siblings, and granddaughter committed suicide too.
In order to prove that Hemmingway was a straight man, the group discussed an affair he’d allegedly had with the married Jane Manson. That cracked me up. I’m always amazed how quickly het folks dismiss someone’s homoness simply because they had an affair with a person of the opposite sex. I asked if they’d never heard of the rumors about Papa and F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald’s wife said her husband and Hemmingway behaved like “lovers.”)
In A Moveable Feast, Hemmingway has a conversation with Gertrude Stein about homosexuality. He seems to accept lesbians but not gay men. Gertrude let him know, “You know nothing about this, Hemingway. You’ve met known criminals and sick people and vicious people. The main thing is that the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink and take drugs, to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy."
Honestly, I think SHE knew nothing about male homosexuality.
Hemingway was obsessed with masculinity and had male gay characters in some of his work, such as:
The Mother of the Queen (about a homo bullfighter).
Across the River and into the Times (has a male homo artist).
I went on to speak about Hemingway's love for Havana’s Barrio Chino (Cuba's Chinatown) and explained how Cuba sold Hemingway to tourists as part of Cuba’s ’50’s image even though they reject the Corporate Capitalist era. http://www.hemingwaysociety.org/justice/ Everything Hemmingway in Cuba has been franchised. I never thought I could become so inspired by Hemingway, but having been surrounded by his fans made all the difference.
Gregory Hemingway, the author’s s transsexual son, a former doctor who went by Gloria Hemingway after a sex change operation, died in jail at 69. He seemed drunk and “charged with indecent exposure and resisting arrest without violence after a park ranger reported a pedestrian with no clothes on” (the officer said she was shoeless and had a dress and heels in her hands).
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conwa...
These days, the Hemmingway's wouldn't be in turmoil for being LGBTQ. Lady Gaga is rumored to be a hermaphrodite and no one gives a flying porcupine: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/200...
If you’re the type of traveler that plans a trip around visiting old authors’ homes, be sure to make a stop at Hemingway’s Key West Home, also known as the “gay capital” of Florida. (I’m just saying…).
Tidbit:
At 28, Hemingway wrote, MEN WITHOUT WOMEN
I normally read new releases, but every year around November, I treat myself to world-famous short stories written by dead brilliant minds in the English literary tradition. http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-sto...
Yesterday, I paid tribute to Edgar Allan Poe who once said, "All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry" and read something I’d never read before: The Pit and the Pendulum--about death, choice and hope rolled into one. Although affective, I found myself cringing and wanting to stop reading… but I didn’t.
Two words: Disturbing. Claustrophobic. http://heroeswiki.com/Image:Claustrop...
After reading the story, I dreamed Stephenie Meyer stepped into my living room wearing a long, dark raincoat. She trudged around the room, patting her pockets, searching everywhere for the Twilight Saga journal she’d misplaced. Her eyeballs landed on my half-eaten medianoche sandwich. She grabbed it from my hand, devoured it in one bite, and smiled. I watched as she looked into a mirror and swept a hand through her cascading hair while strawberry jam dripped from the side of her mouth.
Stephenie vanished and I found the journal outside on the street and tore three pages out of it and read them voraciously, but they were about Poe’s work. I pasted them on a large mirror and can’t remember the rest.
Two things are for sure:
1. I make a mean, authentic, medianoche sandwich with a twist that would bring Poe back from his grave and Stephenie over for a bite (no pun intended).
2. I have no clue what the hell my dream meant
(Getting back to the sandwich for a second…
I've also been known to prepare a mix of an Elena Ruz--another infamous Cuban sandwich--and medianoche/midnight that I only recommend once a year because it's so rich. If you’d like to make this unusual sandwich, scroll down for the recipe... if not, watch this video which has absolutely nothing to do with recipe: http://video.google.com/videoplay?doc...#)
Until recently, when I wrote my first dark, magical realism short story for Running Press' anthology, CORNERED--to be released Spring, 2012--I couldn’t stomach dark, bloody stories, and as you can imagine, thrillers were out of the question.
Surprisingly, I’ve gone through a breakthrough.
After writing Inside the Inside, I’ve been able to read suspense and watch suspense films (LOVE them), but not sure if I can stomach hard-core thrillers yet. Violence seriously disgusts me. Can one work their way towards reading it without feeling repulsed?
Here's the mixed-up sandwich recipe I promised:
A Sort of MEDIANOCHE / ELENA RUTH SANDWICH
Buy sweet, Hawaiian, soft rolls or Challah (sweet, soft egg bread).
Cut the loaf lengthwise. Slice your piece open, toast, and spread the following on one half:
• Butter
• Mustard
* Mayonnaise
Spread the following on the other side:
• 2 TBS Cream cheese
• 2 TBS Strawberry marmalade
Add the following:
• 3 ham slices
• 2 pork slices
• 2 turkey slices
• 2 Swiss cheese slices
Place sandwich in a hot buttered skillet and press down hard with a heavy skillet or cast iron pot till cheese melts.
Enjoy!
TIDBITS:
• You don’t need to be Cuban or an adult to make Cuban bread
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=228KxO...
Yesterday, I paid tribute to Edgar Allan Poe who once said, "All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry" and read something I’d never read before: The Pit and the Pendulum--about death, choice and hope rolled into one. Although affective, I found myself cringing and wanting to stop reading… but I didn’t.
Two words: Disturbing. Claustrophobic. http://heroeswiki.com/Image:Claustrop...
After reading the story, I dreamed Stephenie Meyer stepped into my living room wearing a long, dark raincoat. She trudged around the room, patting her pockets, searching everywhere for the Twilight Saga journal she’d misplaced. Her eyeballs landed on my half-eaten medianoche sandwich. She grabbed it from my hand, devoured it in one bite, and smiled. I watched as she looked into a mirror and swept a hand through her cascading hair while strawberry jam dripped from the side of her mouth.
Stephenie vanished and I found the journal outside on the street and tore three pages out of it and read them voraciously, but they were about Poe’s work. I pasted them on a large mirror and can’t remember the rest.
Two things are for sure:
1. I make a mean, authentic, medianoche sandwich with a twist that would bring Poe back from his grave and Stephenie over for a bite (no pun intended).
2. I have no clue what the hell my dream meant
(Getting back to the sandwich for a second…
I've also been known to prepare a mix of an Elena Ruz--another infamous Cuban sandwich--and medianoche/midnight that I only recommend once a year because it's so rich. If you’d like to make this unusual sandwich, scroll down for the recipe... if not, watch this video which has absolutely nothing to do with recipe: http://video.google.com/videoplay?doc...#)
Until recently, when I wrote my first dark, magical realism short story for Running Press' anthology, CORNERED--to be released Spring, 2012--I couldn’t stomach dark, bloody stories, and as you can imagine, thrillers were out of the question.
Surprisingly, I’ve gone through a breakthrough.
After writing Inside the Inside, I’ve been able to read suspense and watch suspense films (LOVE them), but not sure if I can stomach hard-core thrillers yet. Violence seriously disgusts me. Can one work their way towards reading it without feeling repulsed?
Here's the mixed-up sandwich recipe I promised:
A Sort of MEDIANOCHE / ELENA RUTH SANDWICH
Buy sweet, Hawaiian, soft rolls or Challah (sweet, soft egg bread).
Cut the loaf lengthwise. Slice your piece open, toast, and spread the following on one half:
• Butter
• Mustard
* Mayonnaise
Spread the following on the other side:
• 2 TBS Cream cheese
• 2 TBS Strawberry marmalade
Add the following:
• 3 ham slices
• 2 pork slices
• 2 turkey slices
• 2 Swiss cheese slices
Place sandwich in a hot buttered skillet and press down hard with a heavy skillet or cast iron pot till cheese melts.
Enjoy!
TIDBITS:
• You don’t need to be Cuban or an adult to make Cuban bread
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=228KxO...
