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"Paisley Girl" by Fran Gordon
In an inventive and funny first novel, a terminally hip young heroine bears the blemishes of what may be a terminal disease.
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[10/15/99]

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Has the influence of the New York Times Bestseller List declined?
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"The Predictors" by Thomas A. Bass
Can two mathematicians use chaos theory to master the stock market?
By Lee Dembart
[10/14/99]

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Aleksandar Zograf's comics offer a bleak, hilarious, haunted perspective on life in Serbia.
By Chris Lanier
[10/13/99]

Ivory Tower
The sacred profaned in Santa Fe
Seeking the intellectual rigor of Catholicism, she found instead a recorded voice in the confessional booth.
By Lillie Wade
[10/13/99]

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One of the greatest chalk-grabbers was a student named Peter, who veritably leaped from his seat almost every day to scrawl arcane diagrams on the board and demand from the audience entry into his interior monologue. Once he presented an intriguing model for explaining economic and political systems, a two-axis grid that clarified capitalism, socialism and communism. I dutifully copied it down, not knowing how soon it would empower me to become a chalk-grabber myself.

About a year later, I was on a sabbatical studying Spanish in a tiny Mexican village north of Puerto Vallarta. I was the only student of a woman named Mariana, sitting for two hours each day in front of a crude blackboard while she patiently brought me to a modest level of competency in her native language. Mariana, fervent and committed, was a gentle woman of about 30, who spoke very little English and had a voice I could barely hear. The blackboard was our forum of communication. As ocean waves crashed in the background, we struggled through the intricacies of verb tenses and vocabulary. She cared deeply about her teaching and took great pride in my learning.

Toward the end of our time together, Mariana began asking me to explain basic political and economic theory to her, particularly the differences between capitalism, socialism and communism. She explained that she needed to know where she stood on the "controversias grandes," and wondered if I could help. It seemed preposterous to me, overwhelmed with shyness by the fragility of my Spanish, that I could accomplish such a task, so I shrugged off her request repeatedly.

Finally, after a week of her persistent urging, I stood up from my old wicker chair, took the chalk and stared at the decrepit blackboard. The chalk felt like lead in my hand. She was my teacher, my maestra, and here, in her village in Mexico, I had the audacity to stand up in front of her and presume to explain global economic theories in Spanish.

"Este lámina es un representación o modelo de la sistema económico y político," I began, drawing Peter's diagram out of the dustbin of my memory and wincing at my accent.

Next page | Could my little chart affect the next Mexican revolution?