Discovering Books : WHEN THE READING LIGHT WENT ON

Yxta Maya Murray, Loyola Law School professor and author of two novels, “Locas” and “What It Takes to Get to Vegas.”

I can remember the exact moment when I became a real nut about reading--somebody who loves books so much that she sneaks them into movies, lugs them along while walking the dog, and sits in the corner of a bookstore to read an entire volume before she buys it.

The moment came in 1981, in seventh grade, during a 4 p.m. English class at Newcomb Junior High in Long Beach.

To better understand my epiphany, you should know I was your typical Latina Long Beach loner: Overweight, bespectacled, wearing somewhat strange clothes purchased from the Broadway Chubbies section or local garage sales, weirdly haired, somewhat morose. My lovely, lithe non-Latina loner classmates called me Freaksta.

There I was, sitting in English when our teacher handed us a poem written by T.S. Eliot called “The Hollow Men”:

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

I couldn’t believe it! There was my seventh-grade life there on the page! I pictured angst-ridden scarecrows with broom-shaped heads running around and feeling really depressed and, man, did I know what they felt like. I also thought that this guy, T.S. Eliot, must be pretty incredible to write about the poor broom-heads like that, and I decided that I was going to travel to wherever he lived and meet him and become very close and personal friends with him.

Well, T.S. Eliot turned out to live in Valhalla, and I later found out that he was an anti-Semite and misogynist. But I’ll never forget that first introduction to his work--there is something so crystal and bright about that memory. It led me to major in English in college, and later, to write my own works.

Even today, I’m trying to write something as beautiful as what I first read from Eliot’s pen.