In the last decade of the 20th century, Vanity Fair—in what no doubt was a well-intended nod to the rising tide of Spanish-language and Latino literature—fabricated “Las Girlfriends,” a group portrait of authors Julia Alvarez, Ana Castillo, Denise Chavez, and Sandra Cisneros. (I have since forgotten—probably with good reason—what the accompanying text was about.) However, President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor and the attendant bleating and bellowing from apparently drug-crazed white men reminded me what a great thing it will be to have a Latina woman (sic) on the Supreme Court. My acquaintance with Latin culture and women gives me no small admiration for women who run the gauntlet of both a matriarchal and macho social nexus. At the risk of overstating/generalizing, a smart Latina is a powerful person to behold.

I was curious to know what Vermont dairy farmer, Middlebury mentor emeritus, Bread Loaf éminence blithe Alvarez (Saving the World, In the Time of the Butterflies) thought about the Sotomayor nomination. Her response:

…Touré, reviewing Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, talked about Obama being “a post-black president.” The nation was ready to move beyond the Civil Rights paradigm, he suggested, and become a post black nation…

But are we ready yet for a post-Latino nation? Immigration reform is still in the offing, the new civil rights agenda, as of yet not going anywhere. Interesting that this Supreme Court nomination is bringing this fact to the fore. A post-black president is one thing, but a post-Latina Supreme Court justice? Female and Latina could be the double whammy!

That said, it’s through these processes (as with Obama’s campaign and election) that we find out where we really are as a nation, and in this ongoing experiment we call the United States, we have the possibility of making adjustments. So, I’m hoping Sotomayor proves as capable as Obama in navigating the tricky waters of a whole lingering infrastructure of racism and sexism as she goes through her confirmation hearings.

Meanwhile, it’s interesting to listen to different pundits and politicos round their mouths around all her vowels! It’s a good thing she doesn’t have double r’s in her name that have to be rolled. That could do her in!

 —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 10, 2009

With nearly 30 books of novellas, novels, stories, essays, poetry, and food and travel writing under his ample belt, one might expect Jim Harrison’s name to have to have wider currency, at least among smart folks that read books. Yet, despite being translated into more than 20 languages and selling well, I rarely meet other readers of Mr. Harrison’s. Living in New England could explain that—Harrison once told me he had a reading here, attended by a smattering of people—the next night in Jackson, Miss., there was an audience of a few hundred appreciative souls. For his large and largely invisible audience I am pleased to note Harrison’s new novel, The English Major (which is not about a British soldier), which has 60-year-old Michigan farmer Cliff, recently divorced from real estate broker wife Viv, still grieving over the passing of his 13-year-old Labrador mix Lola, embarking upon a road trip around America, using a jigsaw puzzle of the U.S. as a template as the itinerary for his voyage—at one point vowing to rename the states and their state birds as a gesture against some unidentified banality.

One of the pleasures of reading Harrison is that his character’s first-person ruminations are honest and sage and frequently amble to the funny side. For example, sex—which is still (I hope) a vital part of the human experience—is given its proper, deep-breathing due. In this case, even for a 60-year-old geezer. Throughout, Harrison scribes a lively balance between the way English major/mentor Cliff observes and comments on both his outer and inner peregrinations.

By the way, here are some of the renamed states: New York/Iroquois, Georgia/Creek, Oklahoma/Cherokee, Florida/Seminole, South Dakota/Lakota, Wyoming/Cheyenne.

You get it, right?

Speaking of road trips and road books—the quintessential American activity since de Tocqueville, whose 1830s trip has since been reiterated by Richard Reeves (American Journey) in the 1980s and recently by Bernard-Henri Lévy (American Vertigo) in the 21st century, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, claiming inspiration from the New Deal’s WPA’s state guides, corralled 50 writers to write about the 50 states for State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America—including a wonderful bonus of a conversation with Edward P. Jones on Washington, D.C.

I leave it to you to ponder the odd couplings, but my vote goes to Dagoberto Gilb writing on Iowa. It should not go unnoted that in 1922 The Nation launched a series of articles on each state, written by a diverse and contentious gaggle of writers—Edmund Wilson (New Jersey), Theodore Dreiser (Indiana), H.L. Mencken (Maryland), W.E.B. DuBois (Georgia), Willa Cather (Nebraska), and Sinclair Lewis (Minnesota)—which was anthologized in two volumes in 1923 and 1924 as These United States. In 2003 The Nation repeated that project, edited by John Leonard, with the likes of Frank Conroy, James Lee Burke, Luc Sante, Mike Davis, Ana Castillo, Jim Grimsley, Rosario Ferré, Larry Watson, Elizabeth Benedict, and Donald Hall.

All this leaves me wondering when someone will get the bright idea for the Last American Road Trip… —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 27, 2008