Luis Alberto Urrea's Blog, page 24
October 28, 2011
Bibliography
Bell, Stewart. The Martyr's Oath: The Apprenticeship of a Homegrown Terrorist.
Mississauga, ON: Wiley, 2005.
Biale, David, ed. Cultures of the Jews: A New History. New York: Schocken, 2002.
Bowker, Michael. Fatal Deception: The Untold Story of Asbestos: Why It Is Still Legal
and Still Killing Us. N.p.: Rodale, 2003.
Capodiferro, Alessandra, ed. Wonders of the World: Masterpieces of Architecture from
4000 BC to the Present. Vercelli: White Star, 2004.
Cross, Charles R. Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix. New York:
Hyperion, 2005.
Maltin, Leonard, ed. Movie & Video Guide 2002 Edition. New York: New American, 2001.
Meidenbauer, Jörg, ed. Discoveries and Inventions: From Prehistoric to Modern Times.
Lisse: Rebo, 2004.
Puzo, Mario. The Family: A Novel. Completed by Carol Gino. New York: Harper, 2001.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. New York: Scholastic, 1999.
---. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Thorndike, ME: Thorndike, 2000.
Suskind, Ron. The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of
Paul O'Neill. New York: Simon, 2004.
Biography
Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet voluptate rump ut jowl beef. Qui shank incididunt shankle sed. Ullamco reprehenderit tenderloin, salami spare ribs dolore veniam jerky chuck bresaola filet mignon pork eiusmod ham hock. Biltong pork loin aute, qui anim shoulder aliquip. Magna meatball fatback ea boudin bacon. Eiusmod leberkäse pig tempor, salami ea fatback kielbasa sed. Pancetta jowl eu velit ullamco, boudin tongue meatloaf sirloin pork tri-tip.
Andouille occaecat in pariatur. Laboris biltong adipisicing cow, reprehenderit enim duis anim ea nostrud ham kielbasa eu id ad. Pig ham quis, nisi tri-tip capicola consequat ball tip occaecat pastrami leberkäse tenderloin aliquip. Consequat eiusmod minim dolor, t-bone aliquip jerky magna nisi. Pork chop sint dolore, cow minim strip steak mollit voluptate hamburger spare ribs biltong pork belly. Hamburger et meatball capicola in. Est dolor adipisicing meatball pork belly, voluptate venison aliqua pariatur do leberkäse shoulder irure pastrami.
Labore swine shank, dolore minim ham hock dolore magna. Duis et cow veniam irure. Pork chop est tempor short loin beef ribs, sint id. Tongue enim adipisicing aliqua beef ribs swine, dolor labore tempor non ribeye pork belly. Tri-tip elit pork chop, sed dolore swine magna turducken chuck in short loin ut officia do. Ea spare ribs do aliquip. Tongue pariatur officia, frankfurter consectetur ham tri-tip sausage velit leberkäse deserunt strip steak labore.
October 27, 2011
October 9, 2011
My life in animal rescue
Sunday, after a blazing week of recording the audiobook of Queen of America. I have been in the gorgeous high-tech recording studio in dntn Chi every day, bent to the mike with my engineer pals Mark and Jason, and Suzanne, intrepid long-distance producer on the phone line. It is going very well. I am happy to tell you I'm cranking it out like six crazy people. I have to be my own theater troupe, play all the characters. I didn't really ponder how much sexier this book is than, say, The Hummingbird's Daughter. Or how romantic it is. Dang if there isn't a lot of sensual romance in this book. Well! Think of it as my reading you a bed-time story, only, um, in bed.
Still, I'm the kind of guy who gets excited about things. Like whispering in ears in bed. But even more exciting to me than all the high-tech babbling and acting I'm doing is the other stuff. Like the squirrel rescue. An abandoned baby fox-squirrel came to Chayo in the back yard and asked to be saved. He asked twice, so she came to get me. He was in sad shape. Flies were all over his tiny face, and he was weak and exhausted. I wrapped him in a towel and held him and as soon as I stroked his head, he went to sleep. Check him out:
We took him to the amazing Willowbrook Wildlife Center and they took him in, cleaned him up, put him in the incubator with some other abandoned babies, and gave him some delish baby formula. They have their own forest preserve, and when the squirrels are old enough, they will be released in a gang to hit the trees together. We'll actually get a graduation post-card to let us know he's on his way. Felt like piles of good nature-karma sprinkling down on our fam.
This week, I'll finish the audiobook, and I'll head for AZ, where I'll swallow my general dread and address border issues at ASU on Thursday. Here's the link:
From there, to beloved Vermont, to the Brattleboro literary festival. Cinderella will meet me there for a fabu getaway--country drive, hotels, and Julia Alvarez. What, are you kidding me? How lucky can you get? Here's the link for that:
I am also thrilled to be returning, finally, to San Diego. I'll be doing a partay for Adventures by the Book, and the pachanga will certainly also addres the San Diego One Book celebration. I will try to sneak to TJ while I'm there--I have a contract with a magazine to write a story down there. It'll be a big time for us, I promise. Although it'll cost you some bucks if you go, you'll get great eats and vino and books AND you'll be donating an additional book to the libraries and schools of One Book, One San Diego. Here, dears, is the link for that:
There are many other things coming. Keep an eye on the Calendar on the website. We are about a month away from the hardcovers of Queen to starh appearing. My publicity team is really revving things up. So, you know, I have to do my part by making superhuman efforts, which I'm trying to do. If you haven't, follow on Twitter, wouldja? Help an hermano out. @urrealism. Also, give a thought to friending or liking my Facebook pages if you haven't. The more the merrier. Think of how happy you'll make my dear friends in NYC!
By the way--I'm so very excited that our fabulous webmasters are working on the Teresita area of the website, set to launch soon. Photos, family testimonies, bibliography, links, and essays. Watch for it. Till then, I'll see you out there somewhere. And later, I'll whisper in you ear.
XXX, L
Tags: Queen of Americarecordingbook tourChayo
October 1, 2011
Sketchbook Saturday
Straight from my notebooks: On the road somewhere in time in the American West.
Tags: Sketchbook Saturday
September 26, 2011
California Dreamin'
All the leaves are brown...well, not yet. But the sky is gray.
I'm leaving in an hour for California. This starts my third straight week of being on the road. I've been in DC locked in meeting rooms, in Arkansas having strange experiences, in El Paso rceiving a literary legacy award and hanging with my homies. On to Claremont, and from there to Pasco, WA. Dad is getting tired and charred. I hesitate to say all this roadwork is anything but AWESOME, since people who want to be well-known get mad if I do. If we do. You know, even Bon Jovi is a cowboy, on a steel horse he rides.
After that, I'll be in AZ and MI and CA again and VT and...um. I don't know where I'll be. We keep the calendar on the website.
Like many Mexican-Americans (American-Mexicans?) I come from a long line of diabetics. Blindness, disability, death have been present in my elders from the sugar. I watched Tia Flaca take a shot every day. Even my brothers wrestle with it, I think. Me, too! So it's hard and sometimes really hard to manage the blood on these jaunts. It's hard to keep the food sane--that's why I pack low-sugar protein bars in case I can't eat the repasts offered me. F'r example--I was recently served a lovely lasagna with noodles and white cream sauce and buttered bread. Um, wow. And, no. But thank you, and I love you. But I can't starch up like that.
You go! Go go! I need to remember that trip exhaustion and gig exhaustion (you have to fire up to incandescent levels if you want to carry an auditorium full of 750 or 1200 people...even if you want to elevate a classroom full of 15), and it's easy to confuse that burn-out with having exercised or actually gone out running or biking or hiking. You're just freakin' tired. And your feet hurt. So you don't move. and the hotel has a.c. so being the ice man, I set it to freezing. And watch cable or try to sleep.
It's like The Amazing Race: Urrea Edition. Unbelievable fun, unbelievably difficult sometimes. But here's a wonderful thing my writing students don't know: out there, on the road, our job is to go meet new friends and receive bottomless cups of steaming pure love. It's overwhelming. Sometimes, I think I get tired at the end of a 6,000 mile day from the astonishing joy and affection that hits me. I can't explain this enough, can't put it in perspective. I am not worthy, and don't always know how to accept it. One thing that wears me out is what I call Teresita Mind. I have blogged about it before. But if I don't have my Deflector Shields up, my heart breaks about every ten minutes. I spend my life falling in love. I fall in love with the old man struggling through the airport, I fall in love with the waitress, I fall in love with the shy student, I fall in love with towns, trees, stores, states, women, men, dogs, clouds, everything. And I feel like I'm going to pop.
I might just need a Byetta shot, but I don't think so.
In Arkansas, I saw my old pals Spitzer and Robin. They have a cool house near Lake Conway. Right on a canal that leads into the lake, where Spitzer spends his time in battle with garfish and giant catfish. He drove me around and took me to see his fishmonger, a locally famous dude who recently got out of the Big House for bad behavior. His store smelled riotously of fish guts. He was bantering with a beautiful woman with one lazy eye that looked over my head. He said he was going to chop her into bait. "I can take it," she said. "Women are tougher than men. Women bear children." They jumped in his truck and took off, perhaps to go fishing.
Now, that night, Robin and Sptzr had me over to their house. We reached in the fish tank and petted his two big pet garfish. We ate delicious diabetic-friendly food. Yum. Sptzr, in honor of Arkansas, broke out a bottle of corn liquor. I had to taste it--if you haven't likkered up lately, it's stout. Well, let's just say some boys gathered at the house drank a few and got the idea that it'd be fun to make a Lake Conway cocktail. They called it "The Nipple-Bomb." In it, cream, milk, corn liquor, tabasco sauce...and live minnows. They drank it, too. Poor minnows.
You don't see happy crappy like that in Naperville, Illinois!
Ah, how can I confess that I want to stay home? But I do. I want to stay home. I'm gone so much sometimes I feel like I'm missing our life. My 11 year old is older every time I get back. But I am putting together everybody's future, or trying to. And being a Kerouac Club member. And falling in love...but moatly with my own family and home. And you. I will see little blue birdies and hearts and stars when we meet...out there...back of beyond. I'll be watching for you. Bring some sugar-free chocolate.
Get ready for the Queen of America: one month till she arrives.
XXX, L
Tags: book touressay
September 18, 2011
3:00 Sunday in the Rain
I'm home. Seems prosaic, but more and more, I just want to be here. Not there. That doesn't mean I am not grateful for travel and adventure, doesn't mean I don't like meeting you out there in bookstores or theaters, at colleges or libraries. But I've been on the road on and off since 1992. Really on the road since 2004. I joke with pals that I am a one-man Bachman Turner Overdrive. Need a bus. Trying to out-do Jamie Ford as the hardest working man in lit business. I think, though, now that I can get the senior discount at Denny's--$1.50 eggs, y'all!-- it starts to feel unseemly to keep touring and babbling into mikes like a whippersnapper. Or maybe I just want to putter and watch garden shows on TV.
I just got home from DC. I was in meetings, basically. You didn't miss anything. Tomorrow, I head for Arkansas. I enjoy Arkansas, and will no doubt get lots of entertaining road notes out of it. I was a little sorry I'd accepted the offer because immediately after I did, I was invited to the lit fest in Sardinia. Gulp.
After Arkansas, it's a quick flight to El Paso--El Chuco! My home away from home. Then back here long enough to wash laundry and repack and then off to Claremont, CA. I'll be doing a one city/one book deal out there. From CA to Washington state for a visit with readers. The schedule is on the Calendar feature on the home page of the website.
Then home to class before I head out again. With Queen of America about to pop, the touring is accelerating. (Speaking of Queen, the patient fans will be happy to know that we start recording the audiobook during the first week of October. Yeah, my golden pipes will tatter the microphones again.)
During all of these jaunts, I try to keep notes--mostly for the blog. My favorites are archived here under the rubric of "Wastelander." Go look--I think they're fun. This is also the title of my new series of columns for ORION magazine. The Wastelander. Maybe I'll do a book....
It seems everywhere I go, if I am in what I call "Teresita mind" (that is, open and rceptive to the spirit of writing and, well, the spiri in general), good little things happen. Odd encounters with animals. Dragonflies and hummingbirds come around a lot. But I have sat beside the road with a family of foxes on Mt Rainer, wandered late at night with skunks brushing my legs with cats; yesterday, my FB pals know, our Chayo was accompanied all around the neighborhood by two hawks flying about ten feet abover her head. Weird and wonderful. People, of course, give me story at every turn. They give it freely, enthusiastically. They give it to us all--we just miss it by being distracted or cranky or busy or afraid.
I often just don't feel like writing notes, and I'm sorry later.
My cabbie when I got to DC was a Middle-Eastern gent. Quite crabby. He didn't know the address of my hotel on Dupont Circle, and I certainly didn't know it. He stopped in the road and ordered me to go back to the trunk and find a paper with the address. This was pretty funny, being chewed out in the road by an angry cabbie in the dark. I found it and told him and he asked me, "Which way is that?"
So, later, I tried to do my charming-man bit. This could be a DC comic: Charmingman! I said, "Not much traffic, eh?" He said, "Not bad. Could be bad. Not bad. On 14th St, very bad. But I know how to get around traffics." I said, "You're a master." He said, "I have drive cab 26 years." Wow! I was stoked! I said, "You must have seen it all."
He smiled.
"Do you know what I see?" he said. "Beautiful ladies. The beautiful girls. Just look." I looked. He said: "Before I was 50, it was very very good. So good, I love all the beautiful women. I love them so much. I want to smell them." I said, "Smell them?" He said: "Yes. Like a beautiful flower. You want to pick and smell, it is so pretty. That was before 50. After 50, not so good. Everything's not OK after 50. I no pluck nothing now. Now, I just look. From far away. Like beautiful art."
How can you not be in love with this world? Forever, I will tell myself to pluck it and smell it. Like beautiful flowers.
