Jay Parini

The real mariachis in Mexico are singers like Agustin Lara and Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete - the Golden Era of Mexican Filmmaking. Mariachis sing very soft and very beautiful. That's old-school mariachi. They are caressing the songs.

From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don't write political plays.

I went into academia thinking that there'd be constant reciprocity between my scholarship and my creative work but found that doing one always turned my mind into the sort of tool that was badly suited to doing the other.