gratitude

“This food comes from the labors of beings past and present.

With it our body mind is nourished, our practice sustained.

Gratefully we accept this meal.”

– Zen Buddhist Meal Gatha

This writing is dedicated to my teachers, many of whose words and deeds appear throughout.  I wrote this between 1999 and 2001 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Paris, France, various cities in Thailand, and Oaxaca, Mexico, partly while on a leave from my job as a professor of Latin American literature at the University of Michigan.  Here I want to offer my gratitude in particular to some of the individuals from those and other places for their participation in the making of this book over the past seven years.  May your generosity return to you ten-thousand fold.

Thanks to the members of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and of the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan for making room for ideas that may not always have been congenial.

Thanks to publishers who have made Julio’s words available, to translators in many languages who have passed them on, and to critics who have thought about them deeply and shed interesting light and shadows on them.

Thanks to the members of the Sangha of the Zen Buddhist Temple of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Thanks to graduate students in three seminars I directed on the work of Julio Cortázar: for helping to keep the windows of my lab propped open.  

Thanks to undergraduates in my course on Reading to Live: for insisting on the topic. 

Thanks to Enrique García for reading the manuscript sensitively, appreciatively and critically, all with the eyes of a poet.

Thanks to Alex Herrero for generosity of time and spirit at a time when he could least afford it, and for his friendly scholarly reading.

Thanks to Ross Chambers for saying he admired a draft of the book.  

Thanks to Frieda Ekotto for her approval.  Anybody who knows her knows that you want this.

Thanks to Jason Young, designer, builder, and teacher, for his material lessons in creative process.

Thanks to Carina Yervasi for many years of generously sharing her creative intelligence, her flawless ethical judgment, and her large sense of life.

Thanks to Marjorie Levinson, for too infrequent, but always challenging and so nourishing conversations.

Thanks to Aurora Bernardez for her astonishing hospitality in opening her home and her memory to a stranger, and for her hard work in making many of Julio’s writings, left unpublished at the time of his death, available to those of us who never knew him.

Thanks to Margery Safir for her willingness to share memories and books, and for her understanding support of the project.

Thanks to Ugne Karvelis for her truly extraordinary warmth and openness.  Conversations with her helped bring Julio to life.

Thanks to Ariel Dorfman for first showing me the way of Julio, for traveling it himself, and for continuing to encourage me upon it.

Thanks to Marie Helene Huet for her infectious enthusiasm for the project in its early stages.

Thanks to Emily Colas for keeping the traffic moving.

Thanks to Robb Lee and Deneen Brown for an almost ancient friendship that only improves, for providing an encouraging voice from out in the real world.

Thanks to Koho Vince Cousino for modeling the integration of poetry, Zen, ethics, and cigarettes.

Thanks to Lou Hillman for years of nourishing conversation and food, and for a reading of the book far more beautiful than the book itself.

Thanks to Tom Pohrt and Karl Pohrt for much-needed encouragement and advice from the world in which books are things that are bought and sold.

Thanks to Carlos Krugman for providing the warm personal and intellectual companionship I never imagined finding so easily in Oaxaca.

Thanks to Keith Taylor for numerous conversations and critical, sympathetic readings over several years and for always reminding me, modestly and without ever saying so or even intending it, of what a creative writer ought to be.

Thanks to John McKay for more conversations than I can remember over the past six years, for encouraging readings of various drafts, for the many lessons in thought and politics and life he has provided over the years, and for always being there.

Thanks to San’ga Monica Silva:.  Courage, resourcefulness, industriousness, exuberance, adventurousness.  Your paintings, your meals, your music, your plants; and your pen and ink drawings.  Thank you.

Thanks to Bill Paulson, for fast, critical, and sure reading, and for nourishing my belief that this book mattered, both through the clarity of his reasoning in defense of it, and through the path-breaking example of his own work. 

Thanks to Tongsan Catherine Brown, partner in many crimes (academic, culinary, etymological, stylistic, Buddhist, hair-related and otherwise), for reminding – silently and by her own example – this trigger happy little brother of the possible beauty of scholarship and of the close proximity of care and rigor.  Also for embodying the lesson that there is more than one way to skin a cat, and for sharing with me the discovery that we actually prefer loving on them, each in our different ways.

Thanks to José Rabasa for teaching me the importance of joy in reading, thinking, and writing; and to he and Catherine Durand for their example of a life freely, ethically, passionately, and joyfully lived in a way that would have made Julio proud.

Thanks to Haju Sunim for being my teacher, for inspiring a trust and faith that makes her that rare master to whom one eagerly says: “I want to be your student.  Tell me what I have to do.”

Thanks to Vincenzo Binetti for his enthusiastic encouragement and, more importantly, for his embodiment of the equivalence between compassion and freedom.  Most importantly, for a rare and delightful lesson in friendship.

Thanks to Inma and Antonio Colás, my parents, for loving me through everything, for supporting even my most misguided endeavors, and for their wise and enthusiastic readings.

Thanks to Owen Colás, my elder son, for his example of why reading matters, and to Adam Colás, my younger son, for his example of the power of concentrated effort, and to both of them for caring about Julio and this book, for playing with me, for being living examples of living invention, and above all, just for being…just for becoming.

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