{"quotes":[{"text":"There's still too much energy leftover at this tomb-desk, on Broadway, when I am semi-asleep at night in our bedroom, struggling to get a good night's rest. There's an overflow of loin energy. It spills out from my pores as if I were a cracked drum of reacting chemicals. I need to work to expend this excess energy in words, stories and books....My mind is a body that's a mind.","author":"Sergio Troncoso","tags":["creative-writing","creativity","sergio-troncoso","writers-life","writers-on-thinking","writers-on-writing","writing","writing-philosophy","writing-process"],"id":10903,"author_id":"Sergio+Troncoso"},{"text":"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?","author":"Sergio Troncoso","tags":["american-culture","censorship","chico-lingo-blog","reading","reading","sergio-troncoso","superficial-culture"],"id":157810,"author_id":"Sergio+Troncoso"},{"text":"Rich people don’t have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their 'work' is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention.","author":"Sergio Troncoso","tags":["class","crossing-borders","literature-and-politics","materialism","rich-people","sergio-troncoso","upper-class","wealth-and-virtues"],"id":224932,"author_id":"Sergio+Troncoso"},{"text":"But Anja. I hear Anja's voice. Maybe I am insane. I hear her crying. I see her alone in the trees. I remember being alone and humiliated. I remember, too, the fat little boy hiding in the bathroom. And I see this man, Ariane. I see this evil man, Ariane. He laughs everyday still. He has had years of laughter. He has triumphed over the screams of others, he has triumphed with blood on his hands. And he laughs still. God has cursed us! He has either cursed us or He was never here to begin with. We've pretended God was here for our own sanity! That's the truth! We've pretended evil is punished and good is rewarded. A perfect scheme!","author":"Sergio Troncoso","tags":["antisemitism","hispanic","holocaust","holocaust-literature","jews-and-judaism-in-europe","latino","murder","right-and-wrong","righteous-gentile","righteousness","sergio-troncoso","yale-university"],"id":229360,"author_id":"Sergio+Troncoso"},{"text":"Words are the residue that I was there, that I loved my wife, that I kissed my children goodnight, that I sacrificed my life for them. Words are a curse. Life is a curse. Words escape life. Life escapes words. What in God's name am I? How does someone name a God? What is it to name yourself?","author":"Sergio Troncoso","tags":["creative-process","creative-writing","creativity","literature","sergio-troncoso","writers","writers-and-writing","writers-life","writers-on-thinking","writers-on-writing","writing","writing-life","writing-philosophy"],"id":262705,"author_id":"Sergio+Troncoso"},{"text":"Two weeks ago, Aaron and Isaac, I learned your mother Laura has breast cancer. My heart feels impaled. These words, so useless and feeble. Laura is only thirty-five years old. Her next birthday will be in only three days. I write this letter to you, my sons, with the hope that one day in the future you will read it and understand what happened to our family.Together, your mother and I have created and nurtured an unbreakable bond that has transformed us into an unlikely team. A Chicano from El Paso, Texas. A Jew from Concord, Massachusetts. I want you to know your mother. She has given me hope when I have felt none; she has offered me kindness when I have been consumed by bitterness. I believe I have taught her how to be tough and savvy and how to achieve what you want around obstacles and naysayers.Our hope is that the therapies we are discussing with her doctors will defeat her cancer. But a great and ominous void has suddenly engulfed us at the beginning of our life as a family. This void suffocates me.","author":"Sergio Troncoso","tags":["breast-cancer","breast-cancer-and-families","cancer-survivors","family","family-relationships","fatherhood","fathers","parenting","sergio-troncoso"],"id":301300,"author_id":"Sergio+Troncoso"},{"text":"A narcissist with power will attempt to prove in the world only what is already in his head. He can't 'see' otherwise. For him, the 'outside world' is not beyond him and does not question or challenge him and his ideas. He is the world. Others will assent to his distorted worldview, because he is powerful, not because he is believable. If he possesses any reflection, that will be exactly what will gnaw at the narcissist with power most of all: his 'truths' are inauthentic, and he is a human being without integrity. The very narcissism and power he possesses prevent him from an ongoing relationship with the truth, which begins with self-humility and the curiosity this can create in a person.","author":"Sergio Troncoso","tags":["culture","empathy","honesty","morality","philosophy-of-life","philsophy","reading","reading-books","sergio-troncoso","truth","truth"],"id":311849,"author_id":"Sergio+Troncoso"},{"text":"I exercised my mental muscles in the library, and lo and behold, I transformed myself from a casual reader into a focused one. So it was more than just free books, but also free space and a culture that reinforced settling down, deep reading, thinking, imagining, and exploring with my mind. I am no doubt a writer today because I had a place to go as a kid, where I knew stories were essential, and where everybody also reveled in the wonder within books.","author":"Sergio Troncoso","tags":["importance-of-reading","libraries","library","public-libraries","public-library","reading","reading-books","sergio-troncoso"],"id":370715,"author_id":"Sergio+Troncoso"},{"text":"A group of ten prisoners from Dachau, I was with them, we hid in the forest to wait for the Americans. The Germans had already left everything behind. We had food but no weapons. For days we could hear bombs exploding around us. We just wanted to survive long enough for the Americans to control the territory. We didn’t want to die. At that point, our prison uniforms were the only things to keep us from being shot on the spot by the Americans. That was all we had. Who would the Americans believe? Real prisoners or guards dressed as prisoners? Those devils might even say we were the Germans. This was our nightmare.","author":"Sergio Troncoso","tags":["antisemitism","chicano","hispanic","hispanic-identity","holocaust-denial","homophobia","latino","latino-literature","literature","murder-mystery","novels","philosophical-novels","philosophy-literature","righteous-gentile","righteousness","sergio-troncoso","yale","yale-university"],"id":398525,"author_id":"Sergio+Troncoso"},{"text":"I hated seeing these spasmodic upside-down chicken heads stretching to puncture my flesh. I imagined once that they reached my groin and pecked out my penis and my huevos and kept pecking until they got to my gut and my eyes and my brain, until I was just a pecked-out piece of human meat surrounded by thousands of nervous, dirty white chickens. I think that was about the time I fucked up a pair of chicken heads against a warehouse wall when no one was looking. Well, almost no one. Rueben was right behind me, and that's when he grinned his stupid grin. Maybe he hated the chickens as much as I did. Maybe he just knew que ya me iba también a la chingada. Maybe I was going on my first joy ride to hell and back, and it was fun to watch.","author":"Sergio Troncoso","tags":["chicano","el-paso-texas","family-relationships","hispanic-american","hispanic-identity","immigrant-experience","immigrant-fiction","immigrants","latino","sergio-troncoso","short-stories","short-story-collection","stories","texas"],"id":414242,"author_id":"Sergio+Troncoso"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":13,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}