New Semester's Eve

I'm so excited, like I always get right before classes begin.  So please forgive me, everyone else, but this post is dedicated to my fellow teaching geeks out there.

In my Chicana/Chicano Lit class, a new course for me, I'll be teaching these great books:

Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya, a classic

The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, which I've been teaching now for over ten years--it never wears out!

Borderlands/La Frontera:  The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa, which blew me away in graduate school (though I remember that it freaked out a few of my fellow grad students)--the title page of that early edition still bears my sweetly awed, breathless, scrawled note:  "the most amazing book I've ever read"

the anthology Latino Boom, edited by these great guys, John Christie and Jose Gonzalez, who also have a very helpful website on Latino lit

and the brand-new, still damp from the presses memoir by Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Mexican Enough:  My Life between the Borderlines. 

By sheer happy accident, I ran across an advance copy of Mexican Enough  at the Pine Manor residency this summer, and I got hooked by just the first five pages.  It's a lark, a romp--but with serious brains.  Then--again, by sheer happy accident--I was lucky enough to meet Stephanie herself, very briefly, at Macondo, and I'll tell you what:  even on only a first impression, she's a way fun girl.  That carries over into her narration, so I thought her book would be a livelier intro to some of the cultural and historical material we need to cover than me lecturing at the front of the classroom.   We'll see if the ENGL 245D students agree!

I'm in love with the books for my graduate course in creative nonfiction, too, especially Telling True Stories (a brilliant craft guide, co-edited by Wendy Call, one of the terrific participants in our workshop at Macondo), Food & Booze, the collection from the journal Tin House, and a beautiful collection of essays, Never in a Hurry:  Essays on People and Places, by Naomi Shihab Nye, who (hurray!) will be our writer-in-residence here at UNL next spring. But I won't rave about them now, because I've got to finish thinking through my opening-day spiel. 

I'm reading Barry Lopez's Resistance, and I love the first story and the deep seriousness that it opens up.  Read it, read it. 

But--call me cranky--the rest of the collection just doesn't sustain.  At least so far.  Maybe it'll pick back up, but it's becoming just a shade monotonous, predictable, and the voices of all the fictional narrators are so similar that it's hard to distinguish them.  The first story's wonderful, seriously, but I'd rather just have imagined the rest.

I'm also reading the Bhagavad Gita again.  Like Arjuna, I'm feeling reluctant to charge into battle (another start-of-the-semester feeling), so I'm trying to listen up and see if Krishna will make any sense this time. 

On a totally unrelated note, I saw Bill Maher on Larry King last night.  My Dad used to love Bill Maher--he watched him religiously, if I can use that word in regard to anything Maheresque.  We don't get HBO, so I don't watch Bill Maher's show, but I must say, his interview with Larry King was refreshing.  You don't hear people speak so frankly in the public sphere very often.  Whether or not you agree with Maher's perspectives, his honesty and directness are bracing.  

I think he's the kind of guy that the best of the U.S. founding fathers--the best of them, mind you--would have liked hanging out with.  Little perceptible b.s., little perceptible spin.  There's a kind of unassailable vulnerability that comes when you just tell the truth about who you are and what you believe.  He has some of that, and it's refreshing because that's not a quality that makes it to prime-time very often.

Lastly, how is it that, according to a recent poll, McCain and Obama are tied?  Huh?  Hello?  What did I miss?  Nation, what's happening?