We will see if anything comes of it, but for the first time in just over a year, I have started writing critically again. Although nothing is completed, I think I have started coming up with ideas/projects. Maybe I can pull something together into a coherent essay worthy of using as a writing sample for a phd program. If not, what I did with those two years in the high desert is beyond me.

I could of course argue that I have been writing criticism since I set foot in that first internet café in Salinas just over 9 months ago. The gestation period of a child, perhaps that has some significance. That or I simply read too much into things. Bit of both.

I have been listening to a lot of the music I stored on lappy before I came down here. The memories the songs trigger are startling. Almost every song, and at least every band, suddenly immerses me in another place, in another time period. Boarding school days, fourth form and playing lacrosse or swimming. The first time I heard radiohead back in 94 was the fall of my fourth form year, the infamous play that I was in but not in. man with the briefcase. No lines yet in almost every stupid scene. Then there was the black box experience, a one-act play with one other actor who I grew to loathe over the two months of rehearsals. Ah boarding school.

No idea where any of this is going really. Not sure why I am even writing and not simply reading a book.

Well, I wrote the above two weeks ago and the answer is no, nothing has come of it. I look at what I wrote, only about 2pages, as a good start but the ideas are far too broad and not textual based as of yet. What I am thinking of doing is writing a critical comparison of Ralph waldo emerson, octavio paz(mex) and a third, yet to be figured out author- although I am leaning toward ruben dario from nicaragua, in the main of trying to draw something useful from 3 authors writing in 3 different time periods and in two different languages but with similar goals: create or in some way describe the nascent literature of writers looking to identify their country and countrymen through themes, language and rifts with the countries of the mother-tongue. Clearly for the usa it is England, mex is spain and the third country (if Dario and Nicaragua) will be spain as well. however, to some extent, the usa had to break away from more than England, it was Europe as a whole that influenced the writers of the 17^th 18^th and 19^th centuries, and the work of authors as late as Fennimore cooper (last of the mohicans, leatherstocking tales, etc.) directly reflects the narratives coming out of Europe. Instead of “ mak[ing] it new” as ezra pound was famous for declaiming at the onset of the usa’s modernist period-not to be confused, as I definitely was up until a week ago, with latin America’s modernist movement of the 19^th century lead in part by authors like ruben Dario, cooper and others fell in line and tried to make the genre so famous in Europe “ work” in a usa context. And paz and Dario had to contend with not only European work- Dario was highly influenced by French authors, but with the writing, and in a broader context the culture, coming out of the usa. Paz to a much greater extent that Dario in this example because he wrote more than 50 years after Dario when mexico was finally recovering from their own civil war period and in the thick of a serious of presidents who all came from one party and who hand-chose their successors.

All of this is damn broad and I need to narrow down some ideas and flesh out others, clearly, but this is what I am thinking about right now. Funny that taking a two-week break and then writing about how I had not gotten anywhere actually brought me somewhere. That was the genesis, of sorts, but there are still six more days-years?- of work before I can even consider that the idea is solid and I can rest. I do in many ways feel that all my reading is paying off and I am making valid connections that deserve more research (and by this I mean grants-dollars) and could make an impact within my field. Not sure about the last part but if I want a phd I must find some manner of changing or at least adding to the status quo in the states.

I am not happy with the education system in these sense that I believe we need to have more foreign authors in the curriculum- the canon, and not Europeans but Americans-central and southern. We can learn a lot from their struggles with imperialism. The usa went through it all long before the others and we certainly have advanced at a much more rapid pace (although you would be right to question what I mean by “ advance” and if that word has as many negative connotations as positive-which I believe it does by the by), but I think that we must begin focusing on what we all share in order to better see the differences. In order to break the racism that pervades all levels of government and public systems (and I mean against people of the Americas as a whole, not just blacks or indigenous peoples of the northern territory as these groups are (under)represented all over the continent). Public education, and a good deal of private education as well, teaches the future(children) that the lit from England and europe is the aspiration, the goal, and that the north American authors are the fruits of that labor who have cultivated and sowed the fields of lit with works worthy of reading by every student in the country while simultaneously ignoring that a very large majority of the usa has closer connections to central and south american countries than it does to those in Europe. And I am not in any way qualified to mention the authors of asia or Africa or the pacific islands, so I will leave that for someone else. Will I ever be able to convince a grad school of the same and thus secure a position for study and then a tenure-track post? Who knows. I am down here to try my hand at Spanish and learning a new culture. I am succeeding but have not succeeded. Luckily, I am giving myself more time to complete a project that will likely last my entire life- coming to grips with ways to reverse the current cultural paradigms that paint the people from central and south America as migrant workers who may pick our fruit (and bc it is not cotton does not mean I suggest we have necessarily progressed beyond this stage) but in the end are nothing more than immigrants, foreigners, additions that will never be part of the whole, at the moment offers me no true direction.

Hence, I keep reading. And I keep listening to people talk (bad) about the usa because it shows me what it is like to be discriminated against, for really the first time in my life. And despite of this discrimination, sometimes I am afforded more than others simply bc of the color of my skin, but I am learning what it is like to be stared at every time I go out in public. To be watched when I go to the supermarket to see what I buy and what I do not. Every step I make is observed by at least 5 people from the minute I walk out my door until I close my bedroom door behind me at night. I am no longer bitching about this, because, let’s be honest, I asked for it. I came here and injected myself into a society that though the roads are paved, less than 5% of the population of the region has a car (the amount of taxis is one possible sign of a depressed economy). Oxen pulling carts of firewood- not to be used for heat, but for cooking- and slowing down traffic are an everyday occurrence. I have seen drawings of farmers from the region in the 17^th century, the 18^th and pictures from the late 19^th and early 20^th. There is no change in technology. The tools are the same and the ends are, more or less, equivalent. Living in the poorest part of mexico (next to the state of chiapas) has opened my eyes to a way of life I thought was eradicated with the steam engine. Sure there are a few massey-fergusson or ford tractors, but there may be one for every 500-700 farmers. 2006. 1706. 300 years and what?

I have no answers, only questions. There is a great line from Socrates, I think, that says the mark of a truly educated person is that s/he realizes that s/he knows nothing. Education never ends- or as gen Robert e lee said, “the education of a man is never completed until he dies” (I know this bc I used to have a t-shirt from boarding school that said the same). And on that note, once again bringing up boarding school, where I began this ramble in the opening paragraphs, I consider the circle complete. Onwards and upwards gentlemen-and ladies.