The last few years have been… different. Everyone’s been getting through these times (or not) in their own way; a good part of mine was a tactical retreat from the screens. What I had expected to be a month or two away from my usual haunts on the Internet stretched into a sabbatical of more than 2 years. I’m sorry to say that I fell woefully behind on email, however, in other respects, I used the time well. In the coming months I’ll be posting more about the books that I have forthcoming in 2026 and 2027.
So I’m back and ye olde blog, that one that ran from 2006-2022 with the funny moniker, Madam Mayo, has a sharper focus and a new name: “C.M. Mayo’s Blog Notes + Convos.”
From here on, look for a post on the first Monday of the month with book notes, and on the third Monday of the month a convo, or conversation, however that be defined, usually with another writer.
May these posts prove informative and fun, and spark your interest to learn more about these books and authors. If you’d like to subscribe, check out the mirror-site over at Substack [link will be live shortly] which offers an easy sign-up for the free twice monthly email. You can also follow the Substack version of this blog for free on the Substack app.
Herewith, this first Monday of April, some notes on three of the most sparkling out of the books I’ve read over the past two years.
Maverick: The American Name That Became a Legend
by Lewis Fisher
Trinity University Press, 2017
ISBN: 9781595348388
This slim book of 150 pages (not counting the ample notes, selected bibliography, and an index) is that rare confection of an entertaining read that is at the same time an important scholarly work, indeed one that stands as remarkable contribution to linguistic history, American cultural history, and Texas history. (It did nothing to improve my already much-eroded confidence in journalists, however. Seems that back when, a number of them made up perfectly fictional and defamatory stories about Sam A. Maverick.) Highly recommended.
Read more about this book at Trinity University Press
Read more about the author at the Texas State Historical Association
*
The Outsider: The Life and Work of Lafcadio Hearn
by Steve Kemme
Tuttle Publishing, 2023
ISBN: 9784805317600
This is another of those rare confections, a book you can take to the beach, as it were, but that also stands as an important scholarly contribution. Lafcadio Hearn’s was an fantastically varied, strange, heart-breaking, and accomplished life. Born in Greece in 1850 to a Greek mother and an Anglo-Irish British Army officer, raised in Dublin by a paternal aunt, further educated in the Britain and France, twice abandoned by his family, and badly injured (losing his sight in one eye), he ended up as a crime reporter in Cincinatti, Ohio. Fired for having violated the miscegenation laws in marrying a black woman, he went to Louisiana, where he reported on creole culture and voodoo, from there to the French West Indies, and then, incredibly, Japan, where he secured work as a professor, married into a Japanese samurai family, and left such an extraordinary body of work on Japanese folklore that to this day he is considered an icon in Japan. The author of this biography, Steve Kemme, has done a magnificent job of researching all phases of Hearn’s life and works, from reporting to a cookbook to fiction to literary and anthropological essays. I am astounded that Hearn isn’t better known in literary circles in the United States. Inspired by this biography, I’ve dipped into some of Hearn’s writings, and am now making my way through Hearn’s 1903 memoir, Two years in the French Far West Indies. My main impression: this guy had mega duende. Highly recommended.
Read more about this book at Tuttle Publishing
*
The Importance of Not Being Ernest: My Life with the Uninvited Hemingway
by Mark Kurlansky
Books & Books Press, 2022
ISBN: 978-1642504637
I first encountered Kurlansky’s work in 2007, when I selected his Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea for the Dayton Peace Prize. In the years since I’ve been slowly reading through Kulansky’s oeuvre— so far, The Basque History of the World, Paper, Salt, Cod, and Salmon— but it’ll be a marathon, if a fun one, to get through the half of them; he’s written 39 books. So, as you might guess, he’s been around for some time— including more than half of the 20th century.
I often wonder if younger writers can appreciate how Ernest Hemingway, as both a modernist writer with a uniquely entrancing style, and as a big handsome slob of a celebrity, loomed over nearly the whole of that century. Back when, even decades after Hemingway’s demise, I don’t think any American with serious literary ambitions could avoid nurturing a strong opinion or ten about Hemingway and, at some point, like it or not, mimicking his macho, childlike style. (“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”— From The Old Man and the Sea.)
Mark Kurlansky’s memoir of his own career as a playwright turned journalist and foreign correspondent and author is fascinating and important in its own right, but, to his consternation, in every major chapter of his writing life, from Paris, Basque country, to Havana, and then Idaho, there loomed that Macy’s Thanksgiving parade balloon-sized shadow of Ernest Hemingway. Kurlansky wasn’t following Hemingway, it was more as if Hemingway himself were following Kurlansky in some eerie way, as if time itself were not what we think it is, its warp and its woof perhaps some spiralling construct of other peoples’ imaginal projections. And so the book becomes a literary chimera: a personal memoir stitched onto someone else’s full-fledged biography— or viceversa. This is a serious, richly informative, and beautifully written book about Kurlansky and about Hemingway. But it is also deeply strange.
Read more about this book at the author’s website.
Comments? Write to me directly at pugandbee@protonmail.com
Look for a convo in 2 weeks. If you’d like to subscribe for free, please visit this blog’s mirror-site on Substack, [link will be live shortly] where you’ll find the sign-up form.