Luminarias

Rated R, for language and sexuality. When a spicy Latin divorce attorney finds herself guilty of falling for her white and Jewish opposing council, her three single friends choose sides in the ongoing and often hilarious debate over race and sex.

Well, it isn't council, but counsel, as in attorney. A review in Imdb has the same error in a synopsis attributed to Echo Bridge Home Entertainment.

4 successful Chicanas meet to drink and chat about men, sex, being Mexican, and their problems arising from the combination of men, sex, being Mexican and having problems. One of them gives up sex as a sacrifice for Lent, and beseeches La Virgen de Guadalupe for strength to remain celibate all 40 days. An attorney defends a young Latina in court against her abusive husband, who wants joint custody of their son, and soon catches her husband kissing (of all things) a white woman. A therapist striving to be white, or accepted by whites, does not visit her mother in East LA and can't speak Spanish, yet brandishes a Chicana accent when she calls herself a Chicana. The fourth of the band can't find a decent man, has unresolved issues (having being called fea as a child among them), but soon falls for a Korean man.

The movie tries to explore racial pride, emotional ambiguity, and uncertainty in the face of 40th birthdays. It is in turns funny, touching, even insightful, but it does not work completely. There are too many cliches and stereotypes (the wise Latino man who happens to be a professor at UCLA, played by Cheech Marin with a wisp of beard under his lower lip that looks less Dizzy Gillespie than, what? Mandarin? and the uninhibited Latina aunts who don't watch their mouths but do watch male asses).

Yet, there are some nice performances and good points made. Evelina Fernandez plays the main character, Andrea, the attorney who prides herself on being a Latina, excoriates whites, and defends women against machismo. She falls for a white Jewish attorney, resists her husband returning after having announced he would marry a white woman, and lectures her son on not letting rage (sloppily defined as a legacvy of colonial oppression, or some such thing) overwhelm his Latino passion. In a nice twist, at the end the son, Joey, announces he has a girlfriend named Laura Johnson; his mother assumes she's white, and is surprised, when she meets her, to see she's black.

Still, a good film. 3 stars, of 5.

Travels in the Republic of Letters

Worlds Made by Words
By Anthony Grafton
Harvard, 422 pages, $29.95

Early in the last century, when the German historian Adolf von Harnack was appointed head of the Prussian State Library in Berlin, he chose as a legend for the entranceway the Latin tag Bibliotheca docet: "The Library Teaches." This wasn't just another pompous building-decorating slogan.
Libraries still teach.

For von Harnack, the ideal library hosted on its shelves a lively, if silent, conversation of past with present. The future too was an implicit partner; after all, who knew what might prove important to generations yet to come? If the library "teaches," it does so by promoting this timeless colloquy. Von Harnack believed, too, that "one book is no book." Authors may be touchy, but books are naturally gregarious; they converse with one another and sometimes strike sparks. Only by offering the widest array of resources, von Harnack maintained, could a library provoke that tiny, unpredictable flash of insight on which all scholarship depends.

Thus, information sources interact with one another, and with the reader and researcher.

Today von Harnack's grand dream seems quixotic. Libraries are increasingly seen less as collections of printed materials and more as purveyors of access to data bases and online information.
O, drat, the future has changed the present, and nt for the better. What a common complaint. Off the mark, too.

Mr. Grafton may be steeped in the past, but he is no antiquarian. He is quick to link submerged traditions with present trends. He regards recent developments in technology, and their effects on libraries and on reading, as both a blessing and a burden. Ideally, new technologies don't displace old ones; they augment them. Cuneiform tablets, papyri, manuscripts, as well as books, remain essential to scholarship and to learning at large, if only because the look and feel of the past can be as important as its content. The larger, more troubling question is: Who will read them in the future? Sometimes Mr. Grafton sounds an elegiac note; he laments "the dull, provincial scholarship of our own sad time." He may be right to do so. Nevertheless, he himself represents the best proof that the Republic of Letters is alive and kicking.

People still read, do research, and learn.