hired him as a bilingual assistant at the Mexican shoot of Don Quixote. This would become the first of a series of assistant gigs alongside directors such as Louis Malle, Luigi Comencini, and his own father. In the 1970s, Juan Luis shot some fantastic feature films of his own, including La Femme aux bottes rouges with Catherine Deneuve and Leonor with Liv Ullman. But most of his work has been in documentary. In March 2014, Juan Luis’ memoir, Good Films, Cheap Wine, Few Friends, was published by Shika Press. Edited by Linda Ehrlich, who teaches film at Case Western Reserve University, the book is a compendium of juicy anecdotes, cocktail recipes, household tips, and life lessons (“Never trust a politician... Or a very religious person”; “Always carry a Swiss army knife”). As his book relates, Juan Luis relished the intellectual excitement he found at Oberlin and the endless opportunities to cause trouble on what was still a conservative 1950s campus. “We used to have bull sessions to talk and exchange ideas, which would last until the early hours of the morning.” Sunday mornings were dedicated to undermining organized religion. Having a late breakfast in town, Juan Luis and his friends would “hijack a couple of girls” on their way to church, “drag them into a café ..., buy them a cup of memorably bad coffee and a doughnut... and instill the seed of doubt in their minds.” One wintry Sunday morning they snuck on to the lawn in front of the Methodist church and wrote a large-lettered message in the fresh snow: There Is No God. “He had so many wonderful stories, I told him to write them down,” says Ehrlich, who first met Buñuel during his 2004 trip to Ohio. “He replied that he already had, and sent me the manuscript.” The book sat in a closet for 10 years. “To be honest, I was hesitant about trying to publish it,” Ehrlich confesses. “The stories were great—but I didn’t have time to check if any were exaggerated.” In 2013, a friend convinced Ehrlich that in memoir, truth is always relative. She contacted Juan Luis, and together they worked for a year on the manuscript and gathered the more than 200 photographs that illustrate it. Among them is a memorable picture of Juan Luis in a mock crucifixion at Oberlin: “Charles Fitzgerald ’58 was the thin Christ, and I was the fat Christ. Gwenn Judd ’58 played both Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary. It was a success. We were even called into the dean’s office.” n SEBASTIAAN FABER IS PROFESSOR OF HISPANIC STUDIES AT OBERLIN, DIRECTOR OF THE OBERLIN CENTER FOR LANGUAGES AND CULTURES, AND CHAIR OF THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE ARCHIVES. COLD-HEARTED Woman Throwing a Snowball at a Girl Reading a Love Letter, an 18th-century color woodblock print by Japanese artist Suzuki Harunobu, on view at the Allen Memorial Art Museum through June 7, 2015. The work is part of A Life in Prints: Mary A. Ainsworth and the Floating World, an exhibition that features a selection of the more than 1,500 works bequeathed to the college by Ainsworth, Class of 1889, in 1950. THREE PERSONS By Vijay Seshadri ’74 That slow person you left behind when, finally, you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command, where is he while you walk around the shaved lawn in your plus fours, organizing with an electric clipboard your big push to tomorrow? Oh, I’ve come across him, yes I have, more than once, coaxing his battered grocery cart down the freeway meridian. Others see in you sundry mythic types distinguished not just in themselves but by the stories we put them in, with beginnings, ends, surprises: the baby Oedipus on the hillside with his broken feet or the dog whose barking saves the grandmother flailing in the millpond beyond the weir, dragged down by her woolen skirt. He doesn’t see you as a story, though. He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines, he chortles. When your barometric pressure drops and the thunderheads gather, he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with the stubby little pencils he steals from the public library. He asks me to look out for you. VIJAY SESHADRI, “THREE PERSONS” FROM 3 SECTIONS, WHICH WON THE 2014 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY. COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY VIJAY SESHADRI. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF THE PERMISSIONS COMPANY, INC., ON BEHALF OF GRAYWOLF PRESS, WWW.GRAYWOLFPRESS.ORG. OBERLIN ALUMNI MAGAZINE 2015 / SPRING 13 ALLEN MEMORIAL ART MUSEUM