Juan Herrera, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler
Pg. 175
“I say hello but no one listens except myself and you, of course. Maybe it’s my crazy two-tone Armani dance shoes, the fuchsia tights. Or maybe I just had Juantoomanys. Everywhere I look there is Juan, Can’t help it. It’s true. Can’t knock it, cant shake it. Everywhere I turn there’s Juan.
I find this quote interesting because he is saying how he wants to get away form himself that he cant shake himself, but why would you wan to get rid of yourself? Throughout the whole poem he add his name into words and then says that he cant get away form him self and he wants to stop obsessing over himself.
Pg. 186
“One quick flash of the hands. It was a mother thing. She blessed me one too many times. She crossed her tiny hands over my face so. I saw through the mountain furnace –this old road of lives and cross blossoms and unturned stones.”
This poem was the last of the book the title was How to Make a Chile Verde Smuggler. In this quote he is talking about his mother, and how no matter what he did whether he was right or wrong she would always forgive him and love him. He is also saying that even though he had made many mistakes she was always there to forgive him. He now was visiting his mother in a graveyard and telling how there are so many lives there that are blossoming to new places beyond.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Juan Herrera, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler
Pg. 157
Wanna B: “how to use the fruit-of-the-loom T-shirt to divert attention from your bad credit.”
Sancho: contestant numero uno?
Contestant #1: Hispa-chute!
In the beginning of the chapter he shows a game show that is mixed between jeopardy and the wheel of fortune. While this is going on they are making fun of the Hispanics every answer to the questions starts with the word Hispa, when also in the game show they hit tacos instead of bells the whole setting of the stage is a cheap Mexican like taco curtains and etc. although he is making fun of Mexicans he is also making other realize that when the make racial slurs that more people realize them then you would think.
Pg. 166
“Of course chickens don’t talk – this is the first piece of common knowledge that had to be discarded. When Antoinne Saldivar Exclamado came back from Stanford, after a four year stint for a B.A in economics, the first thing he did was set the record straight for the rest of his familia.
This quote to me shows that someone who was close to them had left and gone to get a better education but while he was away from home for so long he had forgotten some things that to others, who deal with the same things all the time, are common sense. And they were just having a joke about it because to them its common knowledge.
Pg. 157
Wanna B: “how to use the fruit-of-the-loom T-shirt to divert attention from your bad credit.”
Sancho: contestant numero uno?
Contestant #1: Hispa-chute!
In the beginning of the chapter he shows a game show that is mixed between jeopardy and the wheel of fortune. While this is going on they are making fun of the Hispanics every answer to the questions starts with the word Hispa, when also in the game show they hit tacos instead of bells the whole setting of the stage is a cheap Mexican like taco curtains and etc. although he is making fun of Mexicans he is also making other realize that when the make racial slurs that more people realize them then you would think.
Pg. 166
“Of course chickens don’t talk – this is the first piece of common knowledge that had to be discarded. When Antoinne Saldivar Exclamado came back from Stanford, after a four year stint for a B.A in economics, the first thing he did was set the record straight for the rest of his familia.
This quote to me shows that someone who was close to them had left and gone to get a better education but while he was away from home for so long he had forgotten some things that to others, who deal with the same things all the time, are common sense. And they were just having a joke about it because to them its common knowledge.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Juan Herrera, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler
Pg. 142
“How many make it out, brother? Out of the tile hallways, the paste-up rooms, into full meditations, into the upward mobile soul chew ladder of apocalypse or down into the plantation brown girl boy Spanish – speaking tunnel. So you gotta fight like the taxi driver from Poland, five years said you gotta make a little room.”
He had just came back form an elementary school where there were mixed races, Mexican, Italian, Latin Etc. there was going to be a name change but it was over ruled for there were different view from the different parents. He was asking which one of these children are actually going to make it out of that place alive and with their head on straight. Those children in order to get what they need they need to learn how to fight to get what is needed.
Pg. 144
“ I am that paper, I am those words now, the ink burns in every cell. When I look out to the trees, the long winding streets of Tortilla Flats, as they shoot to the hills and cut the electric rails of the Muni buses to the towers and Twin peaks, the fog and into the sky haze, I see your signs, I read your voice, now yes I do. Oyeme, Mamita, Oyeme- not that you are gone into the deep and silent luminous fallen side of the night. Oyeme.
He is more connected to his mother even though she has died he is feeling like she really is there for him and gives him more support. He now knows that she was also a writer and that even though she didn’t like him writing he thinks that could be because she wanted a better life for him than that. Even thought she is gone he can still feel her presence in different places such as the nature around him. He sees her hidden signs and becomes more connected with her.
Pg. 142
“How many make it out, brother? Out of the tile hallways, the paste-up rooms, into full meditations, into the upward mobile soul chew ladder of apocalypse or down into the plantation brown girl boy Spanish – speaking tunnel. So you gotta fight like the taxi driver from Poland, five years said you gotta make a little room.”
He had just came back form an elementary school where there were mixed races, Mexican, Italian, Latin Etc. there was going to be a name change but it was over ruled for there were different view from the different parents. He was asking which one of these children are actually going to make it out of that place alive and with their head on straight. Those children in order to get what they need they need to learn how to fight to get what is needed.
Pg. 144
“ I am that paper, I am those words now, the ink burns in every cell. When I look out to the trees, the long winding streets of Tortilla Flats, as they shoot to the hills and cut the electric rails of the Muni buses to the towers and Twin peaks, the fog and into the sky haze, I see your signs, I read your voice, now yes I do. Oyeme, Mamita, Oyeme- not that you are gone into the deep and silent luminous fallen side of the night. Oyeme.
He is more connected to his mother even though she has died he is feeling like she really is there for him and gives him more support. He now knows that she was also a writer and that even though she didn’t like him writing he thinks that could be because she wanted a better life for him than that. Even thought she is gone he can still feel her presence in different places such as the nature around him. He sees her hidden signs and becomes more connected with her.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Juan Herrera, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler
Pg. 117
“Each one spoke in the narrow circle. Barlow read a poem & it was the first time I ever heard my tia Albina talk about my mother. When it was my turn, next to my mother’s ashes, at the open center believe me, camaradas, I began to cry. This was my beginning.”
His mother had been sick for a while but he had never really acted on it. He just went on with his daily life not paying attention to what could happen. Than when she finally died and the shock hit him like a wave. The sadness was more then he thought more because he didn’t cherish the time they had left and also she was the biggest influence on him and he loved her.
Pg. 119
“At sixteen, at midnight they came knocking. Said my father had died of complications. My mother shuddered. Fell. Something dropped inside of her and grew above us. A tiny flame of sweetness and black. For years, in that wild shadow, she smoked and kissed a stray that crossed our window.
When his father died there was sadness and confusion they didn’t know what had happen. His mother at first was more shocked then sad “my mother shuddered” and the special feeling inside her fell and was lost. The sadness had grown above them like a wave of darkness and sorrow. The sweetness was them noticing the love they had for him and the black was the morn of his loss.
Pg. 117
“Each one spoke in the narrow circle. Barlow read a poem & it was the first time I ever heard my tia Albina talk about my mother. When it was my turn, next to my mother’s ashes, at the open center believe me, camaradas, I began to cry. This was my beginning.”
His mother had been sick for a while but he had never really acted on it. He just went on with his daily life not paying attention to what could happen. Than when she finally died and the shock hit him like a wave. The sadness was more then he thought more because he didn’t cherish the time they had left and also she was the biggest influence on him and he loved her.
Pg. 119
“At sixteen, at midnight they came knocking. Said my father had died of complications. My mother shuddered. Fell. Something dropped inside of her and grew above us. A tiny flame of sweetness and black. For years, in that wild shadow, she smoked and kissed a stray that crossed our window.
When his father died there was sadness and confusion they didn’t know what had happen. His mother at first was more shocked then sad “my mother shuddered” and the special feeling inside her fell and was lost. The sadness had grown above them like a wave of darkness and sorrow. The sweetness was them noticing the love they had for him and the black was the morn of his loss.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Juan Herrera, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler
Pg. 80
“What does he know? Knows nothing about my city of green winds and reddish skirt lust lights over market, reddish as in the fingers and rough elbows of the teen Latinas in search of a diamond, let me say it this way, in search of a kiss from the machine time-keeping unit. I stand-alone in the rubble ground of Tortilla Flats, warehouses of bound bedrooms. Fastened tongue prisons, only worker ants with an anteater noses live here in a tropical blast from inside saves us, at time saves our sexual wasp-shaped torsos from additional counts of suffering and loss and emptiness.”
I choose this quote because it is showing how he feels about being young. How the young girls are looking for some one to sweep them off their feet and take there had in marriage. That when you are young, you are curios wanting to explore all aspects of life and wanting to stay young forever. To stop time and stay in the young innocents of having fun with very little responsibility.
Pg. 89
“What is Mexico? Another fast stop for quasi-Beat U.S middle-class poets to photograph themselves on a literary burro on their way to a Managuan book fair and a backyard hut experience for 800$ so they can come back to their sanded-down desks somewhere overlooking the Bay area and write a feeble twenty-page stroke of masturbations and distortions? Believe it or not, this is what is going on. Look around.”
What he is saying is that when people from the united states, who have everything they want and a lot handed to them, come down to Mexico and try to look for the inner beauty they don’t know where to look because they haven’t had that experience before. When they come to Mexico to get inspirations on what to write about their poems but instead of fully embracing what they are experiencing they go to do what they need to and get out.
Pg. 80
“What does he know? Knows nothing about my city of green winds and reddish skirt lust lights over market, reddish as in the fingers and rough elbows of the teen Latinas in search of a diamond, let me say it this way, in search of a kiss from the machine time-keeping unit. I stand-alone in the rubble ground of Tortilla Flats, warehouses of bound bedrooms. Fastened tongue prisons, only worker ants with an anteater noses live here in a tropical blast from inside saves us, at time saves our sexual wasp-shaped torsos from additional counts of suffering and loss and emptiness.”
I choose this quote because it is showing how he feels about being young. How the young girls are looking for some one to sweep them off their feet and take there had in marriage. That when you are young, you are curios wanting to explore all aspects of life and wanting to stay young forever. To stop time and stay in the young innocents of having fun with very little responsibility.
Pg. 89
“What is Mexico? Another fast stop for quasi-Beat U.S middle-class poets to photograph themselves on a literary burro on their way to a Managuan book fair and a backyard hut experience for 800$ so they can come back to their sanded-down desks somewhere overlooking the Bay area and write a feeble twenty-page stroke of masturbations and distortions? Believe it or not, this is what is going on. Look around.”
What he is saying is that when people from the united states, who have everything they want and a lot handed to them, come down to Mexico and try to look for the inner beauty they don’t know where to look because they haven’t had that experience before. When they come to Mexico to get inspirations on what to write about their poems but instead of fully embracing what they are experiencing they go to do what they need to and get out.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Juan Herrera, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler
Pg. 64
“My head is wet. Everyone is talking about growing the brain of age 1: grow the brain! I suppose the brain is the ultimate sale, product, frontier, capsule, coin, cow, chicken, river, horse, train, rubber, wheel, map, slope, over yonder there is a brain to plow to sell and sew, carry to the market! Who owns the market? That is the old .75 question. Bag it, baby.”
I chose this quote because I found it interesting how he uses brain as if it were a possession or something you can get anywhere, when really its part of you body, you are born with it and there is no way to get rid of it or to gain it. In a sense he could mean that a brain is just a useless brain until a person creates it to be their own by what they learn and how they act. Depending on the person and how they treat themselves the brain forms to many different ways.
Pg. 69
“Who did I read? I said, my mother. Lucha Quintana. Have you heard of that writer? The woman’s neck twisted. No, she wanted to know “what writers”! she wanted to ask the usual worn phrase. Ginsberg, Artaud, Nervo, Lorca, Neruda, Popa, hikmet, Rodnati, Walker. There are the shadows –I should have told her.”
I chose this quote because it shows how society has such an influence on us. When he said that his mother was his favorite writer the interviewer almost didn’t know how to respond for she was looking for him to say some great novelist. Society has changes us so that instead of saying what we want to say we say what they want to hear.
Pg. 64
“My head is wet. Everyone is talking about growing the brain of age 1: grow the brain! I suppose the brain is the ultimate sale, product, frontier, capsule, coin, cow, chicken, river, horse, train, rubber, wheel, map, slope, over yonder there is a brain to plow to sell and sew, carry to the market! Who owns the market? That is the old .75 question. Bag it, baby.”
I chose this quote because I found it interesting how he uses brain as if it were a possession or something you can get anywhere, when really its part of you body, you are born with it and there is no way to get rid of it or to gain it. In a sense he could mean that a brain is just a useless brain until a person creates it to be their own by what they learn and how they act. Depending on the person and how they treat themselves the brain forms to many different ways.
Pg. 69
“Who did I read? I said, my mother. Lucha Quintana. Have you heard of that writer? The woman’s neck twisted. No, she wanted to know “what writers”! she wanted to ask the usual worn phrase. Ginsberg, Artaud, Nervo, Lorca, Neruda, Popa, hikmet, Rodnati, Walker. There are the shadows –I should have told her.”
I chose this quote because it shows how society has such an influence on us. When he said that his mother was his favorite writer the interviewer almost didn’t know how to respond for she was looking for him to say some great novelist. Society has changes us so that instead of saying what we want to say we say what they want to hear.
Juan Herrera, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler
Pg. 32
“And yet things and moments seem pliable, transformative, we move out into the open mix of coffee houses, homeless tenements, beaten down chartreuse movimiento rooms, past the old Victoria Restaurant, Gomez-Pena’s loft on Cesar Chavez Boulevard with velvet O.J. Simpson paintings on the walls, New Age gargoyle trilingual low riders, swamp art spaces, Kulingtan workshops & Pinay poetics, verse-riffs and performero doo-wop, mercados featuring papaya and jitomate sales, gentrified Victorians cutting through the old Irish, Mexicano, and Latino neighborhoods; things appear new, our poesy missions appear refurbished, then the fog from the Pacific rolls in again, homicide stats pile up on the curb, more death, then light, rain, more rain.”
This quote stood out for the fact that it explains from his prospective what the foreigners had when they came to America. In Mexico they would think of America as a better life a place where they can start over, but in reality when they came it was not like that at all they were the lower class had horrible jobs lived in the dumps, they did not have a good life style at all.
Pg. 50
“A writer must deal with big questions, big deepness, big heart, big fist. Big mind, how do we do it?
This quote brings up a good point, that to be a writer you must go big or don’t go at all. A writer has to compete with many different things; other books, movies, games etc. when writing a book you have to be careful that you don’t write the same thing as someone else and not to write a book that there are to many of. A book needs to grab some ones attention, be different from the rest, be bigger.
Pg. 32
“And yet things and moments seem pliable, transformative, we move out into the open mix of coffee houses, homeless tenements, beaten down chartreuse movimiento rooms, past the old Victoria Restaurant, Gomez-Pena’s loft on Cesar Chavez Boulevard with velvet O.J. Simpson paintings on the walls, New Age gargoyle trilingual low riders, swamp art spaces, Kulingtan workshops & Pinay poetics, verse-riffs and performero doo-wop, mercados featuring papaya and jitomate sales, gentrified Victorians cutting through the old Irish, Mexicano, and Latino neighborhoods; things appear new, our poesy missions appear refurbished, then the fog from the Pacific rolls in again, homicide stats pile up on the curb, more death, then light, rain, more rain.”
This quote stood out for the fact that it explains from his prospective what the foreigners had when they came to America. In Mexico they would think of America as a better life a place where they can start over, but in reality when they came it was not like that at all they were the lower class had horrible jobs lived in the dumps, they did not have a good life style at all.
Pg. 50
“A writer must deal with big questions, big deepness, big heart, big fist. Big mind, how do we do it?
This quote brings up a good point, that to be a writer you must go big or don’t go at all. A writer has to compete with many different things; other books, movies, games etc. when writing a book you have to be careful that you don’t write the same thing as someone else and not to write a book that there are to many of. A book needs to grab some ones attention, be different from the rest, be bigger.
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