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.