bienvenido a guatemala

I have arrived! after getting lost in Queens and getting to my plane only one hour before departure and being pushed onto the later flight and. . . and I am here and have a good place to stay, and people I recognize and I´m ready to take this all on tomorrow!


So, I want to welcome you to this long blog, a place that´s becoming my history book or something like it.

yesterday I wrote- "This blog is going to parallel the more publically published parts of my Senior Fellowship project." There´s something more to this, something about the way that our private lives and our public/political/published lives are only artificially separated. I´ve been thinking about how forcefully the political world has entered people´s homes and families here, how clear it is to them that there are not two separate worlds, and how that is really true in the United States, too. What we can all imagine wanting and how we can imagine getting it is so tied up with the history and everyday politics of where we live.

I think it will be much harder to focus and write coherently here in the public internet cafe with all the traffic of people and the timer and all the things that I am about to go do instead of write, and I hope you´ll forgive me that, and I hope you enjoy checking up on my adventures here this month.


miss alice

ps--On the personal/political theme I want to recommend a film I just saw called Tout Va Bien about the spirit of Paris, May 1968. Jane Fonda´s character says something like "When you think of me, all you think of is eating, going to the movies, and going to bed. What about when you go to work and shoot advertisements to get paid or when I go to the radio station and they won´t air what I write? Isn´t that also part of our lives together?" and she is also trying to deal with the artificial separation of these worlds. Naomi´s mix CD gets it, too...