Winners of 2019 Troncoso Reading Prizes

Thank you Suzy Marrufo, branch manager, and the entire staff of the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library for your work on behalf of the annual Troncoso Reading Prizes. On December 18th, we held the ceremony to present the winners with certificates of achievement and gift cards from Barnes and Noble. I also gave each student a signed copy of one of my books.

The newly renovated Troncoso Branch Library looks beautiful. I arrived to an expanded parking lot, gorgeous light from the sunset coming in through the windows, and library patrons quietly reading books and magazines on the new furniture. The circulation desk was also redone. Bravo, City of El Paso, for investing in our local library! Even the reconstruction and widening of Alameda has been finished, so now the road to and from the library is also in great shape.

The 2019 winners of the Troncoso Reading Prizes are: Mirayah Arleene Flores and Anthony Morelos (1st place); Jocelyn Soria and Sofia Aguirre (2nd place); and Isabella Guerrero Cortes and Celine Guevara (3rd place).

I loved chatting with this year's winners and their parents about growing up in Ysleta, education, the importance of reading, and creating a reading culture at home. They asked many questions, and I was happy to have great conversations about how reading can foster concentration, self-worth, and a sense of self that helps you achieve your goals. The El Paso Public Library was where I learned to satisfy that intellectual hunger for ideas and stories, and I could see that hunger and focus in all of these students. Each of them reminded me of who I was many years ago. I love this community, and I will keep returning to Ysleta to award these prizes every year and to talk to families about how they can educate themselves and their children to gain a voice, to reach their goals, and to return and help others.


Every year, we award prizes for students who read the most books between September 15-November 15. The prizes are awarded only to students within the geographical area covered by the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library.

First Place receives a $125.00 gift card.
Second Place receives a $100.00 gift card.
Third Place receives a $75.00 gift card.

All prizes are gift cards from Barnes and Noble Booksellers. A total of six prizes are awarded.

Librarians at the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library register readers during the eligible period of the prizes. The library staff administers the prizes and makes final decisions on all the prizewinners.

If you have any questions or to register for the 2020 prizes, please contact the library staff at the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library, 9321 Alameda Avenue, El Paso, Texas, 79907. Telephone: 915-212-0453.

Is Insta-responding Corrupting the American Character?

I watched President Obama and his town hall meeting tonight, with Anderson Cooper, and their discussion and debate with the audience about gun violence and Obama’s modest proposals on gun control. What struck me was perhaps something odd, but the more I thought about it, perhaps something important about modern political discourse: Obama’s speech was slow and deliberate and thoughtful, while Cooper’s speech was quick and pointed and glib.

I thought about Obama’s slow speaking as a way of talking in a seminar, when you have two or three hours to understand a point, whereas Cooper’s speech was on a timer, a fuse lit with seconds to go, zeroing in on a quick point, entertaining yet superficial. As a somewhat slow talker myself, I could listen to Obama, and I gave him the patience to make his point, and I agreed with much of what he said. I wondered if Cooper—representing the media and in a way how we communicate in our media culture—was more modern than Obama, but also at the root of why we in this country are less of a ‘we’ as years go by, why we talk past each other in political discourse, why we characterize opponents in stereotypes (or other facile categorizations) and caricatures. Has ‘media insta-responding,’ to coin a term, corrupted our ability to think carefully, to weigh, to consider, and even to empathize? When we know of a world that only ‘insta-responds,’ do we start basing our decisions on prejudices, stereotypes, and easily understood theories without tests in gritty practice?

Insta-responding is part of our world in a way that it never was for me growing up. We insta-respond on Facebook by pressing a ‘Like’ button, and that somehow demonstrates our political solidarity, or aesthetic preference, or temporary pleasure, or all of the above. We insta-respond through talk radio, with one voice reaching millions and pontificating on this or that current event, quickly, glibly, for entertainment as well as to score political points. And sometimes these are exactly the same: to score a quick political point is to entertain, even if your point is superficial, or based on a straw-man version of your opponent.

Insta-responding is the internet. The troll is a creature of responding fast, in every newspaper discussion page online, in any kind of entertainment forum online. When you are responding fast, and are kind of an ass, then of course you want the ability to be anonymous. So online responding has led to ‘discussion pages’ that are not about discussing anything, but more like pages of one-sentence hit pieces to vent, to smear, to feel good about yourself when you have little else to feel good about. Responding on these ‘discussion pages’ has never changed my mind about anything, has never illuminated me to a new perspective. It’s mostly invective.

Of course, where we see a constant river of insta-responding is on television, and its news, where anchors respond to events as they unfold, before they know who did what to whom, where reporters give preliminary (and often false) conclusions, but who cares? The point is to respond, to capture eyeballs, to entertain, to show the gut-wrenching images, and later, much, much later, to make sense of it all. If anyone tunes in for that more considered perspective or the matter-of-fact corrections the next day, that is. The TV crowd may already be on to the next disaster, or outrage, or political fiasco. And so the wheel keeps a-spinning!

One of the reasons TV has been the first and most important purveyor of insta-responding is because time is money on television. If you can’t speak (and respond quickly), then you can never be an Anderson Cooper. Every second of ‘no talking,’ of ‘no reacting,’ is a second when the viewer can turn away, change the channel. Advertisers hate that, and so do television executives. When we put a price on time, on seconds, and when we put that time on an apparatus called television, any reasonable person would have expected ‘discussions’ to be glib and quick and definitely entertaining, and with images that would also be arresting. A split-second of an image communicates more viscerally than anyone describing that same image. When we as a country have most of our political discourse filtered through television, what do you, as that reasonable person, think would happen to that discourse? ‘Discourse’ would become ‘talk,’ and ‘thinking’ would become ‘insta-responding.’

What kind of political candidate would be favored in this insta-responding world? Someone who would promise to bomb all the bad guys as ‘foreign policy.’ Someone who would say, “Trust me. Just don’t ask me too many hard questions and expect concrete answers.” Someone who would play to your prejudices and anxieties. Someone with all the answers, as long as these ‘answers’ are easy, digestible, colorful, and even outrageous. Someone arrogant who makes fun of complexity and thinking and any crap that keeps him from adulation, or as I would put it, a slavish insta-responding to him.

Imagine another world. Imagine a world where people would turn off their televisions, and debate outside, over cups of coffee, and not through any filters like talk radio hosts, but face-to-face. What would happen to empathy? Imagine if we had hours upon hours discussing such serious issues as gun control, gun violence, the Constitution, the United States becoming multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious as never before, and that these discussions would be done in town squares, or better, through lunches, and weekly meetings that would last until most of us got hungry. Then some of us would go out for a bite to eat. What would happen to how we see each other?

Imagine that many of us valued being alone, and bolstered our minds through reading, and reading literary fiction from other worlds, and imagine that we would take the time to read these long novels from other worlds, and so consider other viewpoints, other societies, characters radically different from us, yet complex characters surviving, failing, trying, loving. What would happen to who we would consider an Other?

Imagine, finally, that we would seek respect from others not because of the size of our biceps or how we could punch like Holly Holm, and not because we are in an SUV and angry and so we better goddamn get respect on the highway, and certainly not because we had a gun in our hand, nor money in the bank, nor a cutie in our arms. We might still need a gun to protect ourselves, and we most certainly would need a cutie in our arms for a variety of reasons, but we would not go to the gun because we demand insta-respect from innocents, and the cutie would be in our arms because we read, and are calm and reliable, and that cutie is like us, a reader, and maybe even a Trekkie or at least a sci-fi geek. We’re imagining, okay?

It’s not too late, America, to escape the Cave of Insta-Responding. Read. Think. Go talk to someone different from you and take him or her out to lunch. And respond to what you hear, but don’t just blab: write about it.

Why Read?

I believe this is the crisis of our times: we are losing readers, we are forgetting why reading is important as well as pleasurable, and we are becoming accustomed to a culture focused primarily on images.  What happened to our long-term attention span?  Why are logic and fact-based analysis overshadowed by rhetoric and politics?  Why can’t we slow down?  Why do we believe responding in real time on Twitter and Facebook is ‘meaningful involvement’ with society or family?  Why is reading more important than ever?

Over the past few weeks, I have been reading Edith Wharton’s novels at night, and have marveled at the modernity of the protagonists, from Lily Bart to Undine Spragg, and at Wharton’s ability to keep the story moving, the characters evolving, and the reader surprised.  I like to learn from good novelists, and I am learning from Wharton.

I have timed my reading to finish whenever a Yankee game is on the Yes Network, and if no game is at hand, then at least Storage Wars or American Pickers.  That’s it.  That’s about the only TV I watch, or I feel is worth watching.  My kids rarely watch TV, and my wife only watches the news, if that.  They do see episodes of The Office, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report on their computers, which prompts me to consider whether I should cut cable TV once and for all.  But I don’t.  Not yet.  I want to, but I don’t.

Since Aaron and Isaac were toddlers, my wife and I read to them.  Every night.  Thirty minutes for Laura.  Thirty minutes for me.  This was our religion through their grade school years.  Not surprisingly Aaron and Isaac as high-school students are enthusiastic readers for pleasure.  After school, they are as likely to guffaw at Stephen Colbert on their MacBooks as they are to read their novels in bed.  But this family culture of reading, if you can call it that, took years to foment, took attention and care to implement and nurture, and took active dismissal of what I would call the normal American culture of not reading.

I am often asked how I became a reader, in part because many know that I grew up poor along the Mexican-American border of El Paso, Texas.  My parents did not read to me.  They could read and did read in Spanish, but most of my reading was in English.  My parents did hand me two or three dollars for paperback books I ordered at South Loop School from Scholastic Books every other Friday.  But more importantly, they left me alone.  They left me alone with my massive collection of paperbacks, and they never disparaged my love of reading.  The opportunity to read and the space to read are as important as having your parents read to you.  I still remember the lime-green bookshelves my handy father built in my room.  These bookshelves housed my treasures.  I have never forgotten how he took the time to do what mattered to me.

So I don’t know if you are made a reader, or if you are born a reader.  What I do know is that reading widely —reading beyond your time and culture, reading different genres, reading in different languages— changes your perspective profoundly.  Television becomes a bore, and what is said and done on television is amusing.  But it’s rarely important.  The crisis of the day or the outrage of the day becomes just more inane shouting to get your attention.  On the Internet, online status updates are interesting little notes about your life, but never more than that.  It’s not really who you are, and well, a serious reader would know that.  But you worry about the others.  Those who don’t read. Those who take television as the truth.  Those who sell stocks at the clarion call of another ‘crisis,’ or buy gold as they anticipate a Mayan apocalypse, or attack an ‘other’ because ‘they’ are after us, aren’t they?

Yes, I worry about our American culture and how it is shaping us.  It’s short-term-ism, if you can call it that, its obsession with fluff and images, its endless talk about who stunned in what dress.  Are any of us ever going to look like Victoria Secret models?  Will any of us ever get a chance to date them?

We are not ‘censored’ in the traditional way in the United States: writers are not beaten or killed because of their words, and no Ministry of Truth enforces an official version of what can be printed and thought.  But in this culture of images, we are censoring ourselves.  That may be more insidious and long-lasting.  What I mean is that we disparage long-term complexity, and extol superficiality.  We ignore reading, and lavish time on images.  To read, in my mind, is to consider and to think.  To see an image is to react.  What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices?  What have you become when the most expected of you is simply to press a ‘Like’ button?  What kind of gulag is it when its inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners?

Because I live in a different milieu of my own creation, and also because I’m rather humorless unless the joke is really quick and clever and insightful, I’d rather be reading and catch a Yankee game afterwards.  For me, that’s the perfect night.  I can kiss my wife goodnight, and kiss my boys goodnight too (yes, remarkably, they still let me), and know that I am happy to do things the simple way, the slow way.  I focus on how I find meaning in my life over the long-term.  That is how I work to be free.

American Anima

Sometimes you need a break to regain your anima. That is what I needed after finishing a few projects, after a long hot summer, after trying to make sense of the American political scene where a large segment of the population lives in willful ignorance or willful opposition to the great values I thought this country stood for.

Yesterday I suggested to my thirteen-year-old son Isaac that he read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: freedom is slavery, Barack Obama is a Muslim, bigotry is tolerance.  Does the truth matter anymore?  I am not sure.  Everything is politics and spin.  Where do we stand?  Who cares.  It is only a matter of whether I win against you, whoever ‘you’ are, and whether I can convince enough people that lies are truths.  And if enough people act on these ‘lies,’ who is to say they do not become ‘truths’ anyway?  That is the head-spinning historical moment we are in.

I could rail against the specific lies swirling in the political and cultural scene, but plenty of other commentators are already doing that.  Instead, I feel I should be a philosophical conscience, someone who tries to understand what this moment might mean for our community.

As readers of Chico Lingo will note, sometimes I gain meaning from the specific, and sometimes I pull back to philosophize about my experiences.  The movement from specifics to generalities, and back, is a way to test what I think with what I see and experience, and to adjust my thinking with reality.  Perhaps somebody like Hegel would call this ‘dialectical,’ but I simply try to stay away from such fancy words.

I believe you can think profoundly without obfuscation, by using simplicity like a sword.  That is why I write philosophical stories.  Philosophy in literature is that unique nexus between specific characters --their situations and motivations-- and moral values.  Such stories can ‘show the way,’ so to speak, without being heavy-handed; they can encourage readers to experience truths they can appreciate in their own lives.  If you as a writer write a good story, it will be good most importantly because it will be believed.

So what are some of my preliminary conclusions from the strange and acerbic political scene of the United States?  The commonalities of our American experience have been undermined because of our economic problems.  Or to put it another way, we are losing our sense of community, of belonging to and with each other, in large part because we or family members have lost our jobs, we feel economically insecure, and we have experienced businesses and governments fleecing us, instead of representing our best interests.  This Great Recession has turned us against each other.  Whites against African-Americans and Latinos.  Christians against Muslims.  Even the old against the young.

When I sat in philosophical seminars as a Yale graduate student, it always seemed odd to me that abstract arguments about ‘the truth’ were precisely detailed and logically dissected, yet no one ever chose to point out that professors were gentle, encouraging, and even forgiving with their favorites, while being merciless and impatient with students outside the chosen circle.  What constituted ‘the circle’?  It was different for different professors.

But the point was that if you were in the circle, you could learn from your mistakes and be encouraged to take chances to progress as a philosophical thinker.  If you were outside the circle, you were ignored or dismissed.  The discussion of ‘the truth,’ and even accepting such-and-such arguments as legitimate for or against the topic at hand, depended on aspects that had nothing to do with ‘the truth.’  What often mattered underneath our discussions about the truth was how friendly you were with the professor, did he like you, or did he know you already.  When you were given the benefit of the doubt, you could go far.  When you weren’t, you were stopped dead in your tracks.

I think something similar is happening in the United States.  Our beliefs in religious freedom and protecting the rights of political minorities (enshrined in the Federalist Papers and the Constitution), our belief in welcoming immigrants to become enfranchised Americans, as long as they worked hard to succeed, even our beliefs in equality and fairness- all of these values depended on an economically prosperous America.  As long as we were dominant in the world economy and growing domestically and producing profits and jobs, then we could not only tolerate, but encourage, these traditional American values.

But the economic world has changed.  Although we are still the world’s largest economy, many countries have grown faster than we have, some of our companies did not adapt well to the multi-polar world, the dollar is under siege as a reserve currency, and too many of our citizens became fat and lazy, perhaps too entranced by an insipid materialism and celebrity culture.  We don’t read.  We eat too much.  We are not as good as we were in math and science.  The economic world beyond our borders is not only catching up, but in many respects is leaving America behind.

So we have begun to turn on each other.  We have begun to abandon cherished values.  We debase the Constitution, while proclaiming to protect it.  Bigotry is defended with a defiant wave of Old Glory.

I am left pondering a final interesting question: Is our declining relative prosperity in the world a cause or an effect of our frayed community?  Perhaps as we became more of a heterogeneous community, it also meant we worked less well together, we trusted each other less, and we could more easily take advantage of each other.  So our cultural, racial, and religious diversity in part caused our economic problems.  Perhaps it is not a matter of cause and effect at all, but of interrelation.  Our differences and our economic problems have fed on each other, in a vicious cycle.

In any case, we need to get ourselves out of this ditch so that we can recognize the best in ourselves.  Or, in our dire straits, we need to remember who we are, and so get ourselves out of this ditch.  For me it doesn’t matter which way we regain our anima, as long as we do it.  A good start would be to turn off the radio and television, and reconnect with the small and neglected spaces within our mind and within our community.  What you will find here is who you are.  In these spaces, nobody will tell you who you should be, nor how you should think.

Traveling Alone Together

I am toward the end of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, on my iPhone no less, and I have relished every second with this poet.  Just as with Emily Dickinson’s Collected Works, which I also read on my iPhone, I have longed to take a leisurely subway ride, or to have a free hour or so before I sleep, to reenter this portable world of words.

Whitman and Dickinson are so different.  I admire Dickinson’s almost mathematical precision and rhythm.  Her abstractions on poems often match my thinking in an uncanny way: as her song ends I understand, and yet the idea lingers in the air and adds depth where no words are written.

Whitman however unleashes the line from any certainty, and revels in nature’s details, as if ideas would only intrude in the world before our eyes.  I admire Whitman’s enthusiastic camaraderie, his openness to sex, immigrants, the offbeat, and the wonder of being alone.

Both poets in a way seem alone with their poetry.  They are to me deeply humanistic, yet this is not a humanism that values the chitchat of society, or the glib conclusions of casual and catty observers.  They seem alone to me because they travel within themselves.  To stop and remark politely would despoil their journey.  They hearken to ‘others’ --what writer does not want to be read?-- but these others are those like themselves.  They are traveling alone together.

I started Chico Lingo to communicate, debate, chronicle, and explore the days before me.  At times I write to you, the reader.  Sometimes I plead for understanding.  On other occasions, yes, I will pontificate and complain.  But I also write to myself.  It is one of the interesting and peculiar activities human beings can do: they can reflect on what they think, through writing in my case, in which my ‘thinking’ is arranged into words and paragraphs, through Chico Lingo.

I embarked on this journey into myself principally because this is how I have always been.  I want to be alone together with others who are not glib, who question what is given to them by authority or tradition, who wonder at thinking and understanding, the process, and who see what is in between the said, the concluded, and the promised.  When I have ignored this ‘searching self with an acute perspective,’ to give it a name, I ignore myself.  I do it when I am in a hurry, when I am in pain, and when I am weak-minded.  And I have always regretted it later.  It is as if I had temporarily lost who I truly am.

I have often imagined it is the soul reaching out, this thinking and writing alone together.  This soul is meant to be understood and read, and it is meant to reach someone, but that audience is whoever listens, and perhaps limited to those who already will not forget the quiet self that shadows them even within their family.  The audience for this soul, instead of being a target, grants itself into the company of those wanting to be alone together.

So I seek my audience with a vague hope to be heard, but even if I am not, if my words and strange musings remain unread and not understood, I would still reach into the darkness.  I don’t know why.  It is not for the audience.  Nor is it for a vain self.  It is --how can I explain it?-- at once to sanctify and upend life, to lift it from what it is, to focus thought into words and create a call to what was and what is when we live.

Putting a Price on Time

Often in this blog I write about the smallest events, sometimes in Connecticut, where we go to decompress from the thrill and headache that is New York City. In the Big Apple, time is money. Everyone’s butt is on fire to get somewhere, to be somebody.

I have been recently thinking how the television media in particular distorts careful thinking, whether it’s on Obama or the financial crisis or the burgeoning deficits. Pithy, three- or four-second comments replace complex thought and analysis. ‘We must entertain at all costs’ seems to be the mantra. Outlandish comments are entertaining. Quick put-downs are entertaining. Outrage, genuine or fake, is entertaining. Whether any of it is true is beside the point. Capture those eyeballs, keep them riveted on you, and you will win this game.

I have also been pondering the decline of literary books, the rise of publishers as cogs of conglomerates, the domination of celebrity books in publishing, the sad decline of reading as a serious pastime for many Americans. There are small enclaves of literary publishers and serious readers, and those enclaves will continue to exist. But I think there is little doubt that literature is not central to American culture. Movies are the ticket. Television is the nightly companion for the lonely and not-so-lonely.

It is a world I have shunned with more recent effort in part because I do not like how my ‘openness’ to this world affected me. It did not improve my thinking, but instead circumscribed it to self-satisfied, meaningless reactions. It did not encourage self-analysis and self-improvement that would be long-lasting, but abandoned me at spectacles.

I have turned off the TV, except for the occasional news. I have switched radio stations to those with minimal, or no commercials. I have ended subscriptions to idiotic magazines. On the Internet, I have stopped reading the trash to waste time, and focused on acquiring the information I specifically need, or sending the necessary email.

I feel I must create this island in me, to preserve and explore a truer self, to achieve something beyond the effluvium that is popular culture. Do others feel the same way? Have others taken up this internal call to avoid the awful noise that surrounds us?

In Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills, I can focus outside the mainstream, in the quiet of the trees, to read, to work on planting strawberries, to ride a bicycle for dozens of miles without seeing a soul on the country roads. Thoreau had the right idea in Concord: you can find yourself if you spend some time away from the city and the crowd.

Yet I do not live in isolation. I am not a Luddite. I focus on talking to my kids and Laura. I read good books. I exchange often lengthy e-mails with many fascinating people across the world. I am writing and editing stories. But I do not dive into this world anymore as if it all equally mattered. I know most of it doesn’t matter at all, and is just like the traffic outside, a nuisance. I have stopped rubber-necking. Even in New York City, after a ferocious thunderstorm, there is a quiet near midnight that lets you work and imagine.