BOOKS – C.M. Mayo's Book Notes & Convos

From the Archives: Henry R. Magruder’s Woodcuts from his Memoir, “Sketches of the Last Year of the Mexican Empire”

BY C.M. MAYO — August 15, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

This Monday finds me in deep noodling, mainly on my Far West Texas book but also, Schritt für Schritt, my translation of Countess Paula Kollonitz’s memoir of her visit to Mexico in 1864.

Relatedly, herewith, from the archives (specifically, ye olde research blog Maximilian & Carlota ), are Henry R. Magruder’s woodcuts from his memoir of his visit some two years later: Sketches of the Last Year of the Mexican Empire. Magruder’s was one of the many memoirs that I read as part of my research into my novel based on the true story, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. Just as Kollonitz’s memoir has been bringing it all to mind so vividly, Magruder’s woodcuts provide a glimpse of the garden paradise that was once Mexico City— and so much more.

Published in 1868, Henry R. Magruder’s Sketches of the Last Year of the Mexican Empire is a rare and valuable record if the final year of Mexico’s Second Empire, a period roughly the same as the “French Intervention.” Magruder, an ardent Catholic, came to Mexico in 1866 with his father, the ex-Confederate General John Magruder.

The illustrations are the author’s own woodcuts of five landscapes (Veracruz; Acasingo; Chapultepec; Tacubaya; Valley of Mexico;) and five portraits (Aguadors; Coal Bearers; Mexican; Ranchero; Tortilla Makers).

“In the course of the morning we entered the port of Vera Cruz, which town with its glittering Church-domes, dazzlingly white spires and many coloured houses, preseted from the distance the appearance of an eastern city. On nearer approach one is grievously disappointed. The scavaenger birds are protected and encouraged to frequent the place as they maintain the sanitary condition of the streets, they give a wierd appearance to the town and look like birds of ill omen, they fly all over Vera Cruz unmolested.”

“At eight in the evening we stopped at a village called “Acasingo” and heard that a diligence [stagecoach] had been plundered that morning, and if we persisted in continuing our journey that night, should certainly be attacked; what the crowd of Mexican standing around, and all talking at once, and not one of us understanding what was said, we foolishly allowed ourselves to be pursuaded by the rest of the travellers, to remain the night in the place, we alighted and before we had time to reconnoitre, the stage had driven off and we were forced to remain whether we would or not. On searching for an inn we were suprised to find that as Acasingo was not a regular halting place, such an establishment as an hotel did not exist; fortunately we found some people who offered us one large bedless room for our party; the apartment we had obtained must in former years have been very fine, the walls being still covered with traces of old frescoe paintings, it possessed a very fine balcony overlooking the “Plaza” or Square, which, although it may not even possess enough houses to surround it, every Mexican town contains. We found there were shutters, but no glass to the window, and were obliged to make up beds for the ladies on the chairs, the geltemen of the party sleeping on the floors…”

“From the entrance of the Church [Villa de Guadalupe] I had a view of the surrounding scenery which will never be obliterated from my mind, in one word it was gorgeous and magnificent. In the distance the fair Capital, its many spires and dome glittering in the midday sun, surrounded by the blue lakes, and the plains overgrown with the wierd looking Maguey plants; far away in the distance the beautiful snowy mountains, of which one never wearies, bounded one side of the valley, whilst on the other the park and grounds of the Emperor’s summer residence the famous Chapultepec stood in bold relief against the distant blue mountains…”

“The Paseo is about two miles in length— only the upper division of which is used by carriages the lower one being almost exclusively occupied by those on horseback. After leaving the crowded drive the road becomes pretty and is shady all the way, and the surrounding scenery most lovely, arriving at the end of the Paseo the rider finds a most romantic convent: “La Piedad,” the road here divides into two, branching off into different directions, one of which leads to Tacubaya and the other to San Angel a small village in the mountains.”

“The climate of the valley of Mexico may be likened to a perpetual spring, little rain falls except in the months of July, August and September, and then usually in the afternoon between two and five o’clock, exercise can always be taken in the mornings. Sometimes the showers or “Aguaseras” [sic] as they are called are so heavy, that in a few moments the streets are flooded and impassable unless on horseback or on the shoulders of the Indians who during the season make a business of vcarrying people.”

“The City of Mexico is supplied with water from the mountains by means of two grand aqueducts, which terminate in the town in large and very handsome fountains, whence the “Aguadors” [sic] fetch the water in their earthen vessels. These aqueducts are almost in ruins and greatly need repair for at intervals the water may be seen trickling through crevices.”

“These wretched indians are generally not overly clean, and if one comes into close contact with them, it is advisable on returning home to shake one’s coat.”

“The nearer we approached Puebla the more crowded grew the road, and I then for the first time observed the picturesque dress of the Mexican “Rauchiero” [sic] which is composed of yellow leather, elaborately embroidered with silver and gold; the seams of the trousers are decorated with a row of gold or silver buttons, the sleevs of the short and jaunty jacket being trimmed in the same style, over the shoulder hangs gracefully a “serape,” a kind of large scarf fenerally of white and red tho’ all colors may be seen, on the head an enormous “Sombrero” or hat with a large brim also enriched with silver and gold is worn; the Mexican men generally ride on horseback and have the most magnificent saddles, the pommels of which besides being high are of solid silver, exquisitely chased and engraved.”

“In the place of bread a cake called “Tortilla” is generally eaten, in reality it is the bread of the country, it is made of corn-meal mixed with water until it has the consistency of paste, which is pressed between the cook’s hands to flatten it and afterwards baked; it has little taste and is generally heavy.”

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Ignacio Solares’ “The Orders” in Gargoyle Magazine #72

More on Seeing as an Artist or,
The Rich Mine of Stories About Those Who “See” the Emperor’s Clothes

Reading Mexico:
Recommendations for a Book Club of Extra-Curious
& Adventurous English-Language Readers

Texas Books: From the Archives: A Review of Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso’s “Our Lost Border”

BY C.M. MAYO — June 6, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

This blog posts on Mondays. In 2022 first Mondays of the month are for Texas Books, posts in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library.
> For the archive of all Texas-related posts click here.
P.S. Listen in any time to the related Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project.

The end of March 2022 marks the 16th anniversary of this blog, after which point, until further notice, I will be posting approximately two Mondays a month. The posts on Texas Books, the writing workshop, my own work, and a Q & A with another writer, will continue, each posting every other month and, as ever, when there is a fifth Monday in a given month, a newsletter.

OUR LOST BORDER
Edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso
Arte Público Press, Houston, Texas
Trade paperback $19.95, March 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-55885-752-0

Review by C.M. Mayo originally published in Literal, 2013

Lurid television, newspaper stories, and cliché-ridden movies about Mexico abound in English; rare is any writing that plumbs to meaningful depths or attempts to explore its complexities. And so, out of a concatenation of ignorance, presumption and prejudice, those North Americans who read only English have been deprived of the stories that would help them see the Spanish-speaking peoples and cultures right next door, and even within the United States itself, and the tragedies daily unfolding because of or, at the very least kindled by, the voracious North American appetite for drugs. For this reason, Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence, a treasure trove of one dozen personal essays, deserves to be celebrated, read, and discussed in every community in North America.

Not a book about Mexico or narcotrafficking per se, Our Lost Border is meant, in the words of its editors, Chicano writers Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso, “to bear witness,” to share what it has been like to live and travel in this region of Mexico’s many regions, and what has been lost.

Snaking from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, the 2,000 mile-long U.S,-Mexico border is more than a fence or river or line on a map of arid wastelands; it is the home of a third culture or, rather, conglomeration of unique and hybrid cultures that are, in the words of the editors, “a living experience, at once both vital and energizing, sometimes full of thorny contradictions, sometimes replete with grace-filled opportunities.”

In “A World Between Two Worlds,” Troncoso asks, “what if in your lifetime you witness a culture and a way of life that has been lost?” And with finesse of the accomplished novelist that he is, Troncoso shows us how it was in his childhood, crossing easily from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez: family suppers at Ciros Taquería near the cathedral; visits to his godmother, Doña Romita, who had a stall in the mercado and who gave him an onyx chess set; getting his hair cut by “Nati” at Los Hermanos Mesa… Then, suddenly, came the carjackings, kidnappings, shootings, extorsions. For Troncoso, as for so many others fronterizos, the loss can be measured not only in numbers— homicides, restaurants closed, houses abandoned— but also in the painful pinching off of opportunities to segue from one culture and language with such ease, as when he was a child, for that had opened up his sense of possibility, creativity, and clear-sightedness, allowed him develop a practical fluidity, what he calls a “border mentality”— not to judge people, not to accept the presumptions of the hinterlands, whether of the U.S. or Mexico, but “to find out for yourself what would work and what would not.”

For many years along the border, and in some parts of the interior, drug violence was a long-festering problem. It began to veer out of control in the mid-1990s; by the mid-2000s it had become acute, metastasising beyond the drug trade itself into kidnapping, extorsion and other crimes. Short on money and training— in part a result of a series of fiscal crises beginning in the early 1970s— the Mexican police had proven ineffective, easily outgunned or bribed. Shortly after he took office in late 2006, President Felipe Calderón unleashed the armed forces in an all-out war against the cartels and that was when the violence along the border erupted as the narco gangs fought pitched battles not only against the army, marines, and federal and local police, but also and especially, and in grotesquely gory incidents, each other. Some of the worst fighting concentrated in the border state of Tamaulipas in its major city, Tampico, which is a several hours’ drive south of the border with Texas, but a major port for cocaine transhipments.

In the opening essay, “The Widest of Borders,” Mexican writer Liliana V. Blum provides a Who’s Who of the narco-gangs, from the Gulf Cartel, which got its start with liquor smuggling during Prohibition, to its off-shoot, the Zetas, which formed around a nucleus of Mexican Army special forces deserters in 1999, then joined the Beltrán Leyva Brothers, blood enemies of the Sinaloa Cartel. Fine a writer as she is, Blum’s experiences, which included having to drive her car through the sticky blood of a mass murder scene on the way home from her daughter’s school, make discouraging reading.

In “Selling Tita’s House,” Texas writer Mari Cristina Cigarroa recounts her family’s visits and Christmases to her grandparents’ elegant and beloved mansion in Nuevo Laredo. But then, with soldiers in fatigues patrolling the streets, Nuevo Laredo seemed “more like an occupied city during a war.” Chillingly, she writes, “I awoke to the reality that cartels controlled Nuevo Laredo the day I could no longer visit the family’s ranch on the outskirts of the city.”

The strongest and most shocking essay is journalist Diego Osorno’s “The Battle for Ciudad Mier,” about a town shattered in the war between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel for Tampaulipas.

I have hope for Mexico for, as as an American citizen who has lived in Mexico’s capital and traveled and written about its astonishingly varied history, literature, and varied regions for over two decades, I know its greatness, its achievements, its resilience, and creativity. But in his foreword, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith rightly chides, “The United States needs to wake up.”

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson

Edna Ferber’s Giant
& A Selection of Related Books,
Plus Two Related Videos On (Yes) the Nuremberg Trials

Why Translate? The Case of the President of Mexico’s Secret Book

Texas Books: “The End of Night,” “West Texas Time Machine,” “How We See the Sky” and More Books About the Sky & Stars

BY C.M. MAYO — April 4, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

Long before smartphone apps, before television, before electricity, yea verily, before mechanical clocks, our ancestors looked to the ever-present, ever-changing vault of the heavens. Because of light pollution however, in most towns and cities the night sky does not look the way it once did.

It so happens that the subject of my book in-progress, Far West Texas, is one of the darkest places in North America. In part this is simply because of its lack of water, and therefore low population, but it’s also thanks to “dark skies” policies and state legislation to protect it from light pollution (read more about the the whys, wherefores and history of these policies at at the website of the International Dark Skies Association). Not by happenstance, Far West Texas is also the home of one of the world’s most important astronomical observatories: the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis. In the most remote places in Far West Texas, if you find yourself outside on a clear night, you can not only see the Milky Way; it can seem the whole sky is a blanket of stars close enough to touch.

As one born in the second half of the 20th century, it took me a long while to appreciate how shockingly much of my culture’s relationship to the sky has atrophied. I’ll have a lot to say about this in my book; but for now, in this blog post, here are some of my go-to “stars and sky” books in my working library:

Paul Bogard’s The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light I would recommend to anyone and everyone. Bogard doesn’t say much about Far West Texas per se, but never mind, it’s a brilliant, joyous book, entertaining, informative, and thought-provoking throughout.

Telescopes gather light— and the technology behind some of them is astounding. An astronomical telescope is, in fact, a time machine, for it allows us to see light originating thousands, millions, and more years ago. West Texas Texas Machine is but one of an ongoing river of books on this subject, but it’s a good one, and the one I happened to have bought on my first visit to the MacDonald Observatory back in 1998.

Here is a batch of sky & stars books from my working library:

If you would like read more on the subject of our relationship with sky, and on seeing it not with gee-whiz technology, but with your own eyes, I would especially recommend astronomer Thomas Hockey’s How We See the Sky: A Naked-Eye Tour of Day and Night. After reading it, I had a whole new awareness of the sun and the moon and the planets and the stars.

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Edna Ferber’s Giant & A Selection of Related Books,
Plus Two Related Videos On (Yes) the Nuremberg Trials

Q & A with Christina Thompson on Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

The Book As Thoughtform, the Book As Object:
A Book Rescued,
a Book Attacked, and Katherine Dunn’s
Beautiful Book White Dog Arrives

From the Archives: A Review of “Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West” by Rubén Martínez

BY C.M. MAYO — March 8, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

This blog posts on Mondays. In 2022 first Mondays of the month are for Texas Books, posts in which share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library.
> For the archive of all Texas-related posts click here.
P.S. Listen in any time to the related Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project.

The end of March 2022 marks the 16th anniversary of this blog, after which point, until further notice, I will be posting approximately two Mondays a month. The posts on Texas Books, the writing workshop, my own work, and a Q & A with another writer, will continue, each posting every other month and, as ever, when there is a fifth Monday in a given month, that’s for the newsletter.

DESERT AMERICA:
Boom and Bust in the New Old West
by Rubén Martínez
Metropolitan Books, 2012
Review by C.M. Mayo originally published in The Washington Independent Review of Books, February 18, 2013

What is the West? That cross-borderly mashup of music, footwear and haberdashery known as “cowboy cool”? Or is it indigenous? The Big Empty, healing refuge, Hispano, Chicano, Mexicano? Or is it now found in the scrim of “underwater” water-sucking tract houses? What is this landscape, if not seen through millions of different eyes each with its own needs, lusts, filters and projections? And how is it changing? (Radically.) In Desert America Rubén Martínez tackles these immense and thorny questions in a narrative of multiple strands masterfully braided into a lyrical whole.

A memoir of living and traveling through both iconic and off-the-path places from Joshua Tree to Sedona, the Arizona borderlands to the heroin-infested farming communities of New Mexico and, briefly, the artist colony of Marfa, Texas, Desert America is also the story of a son and grandson of Salvadoran and Mexican immigrants trying on and struggling with various identities —guitar-toting “brown cowboy”; Roque Dalton-quoting poet-activist; addict, farmer, husband, father. But more: Desert America is a work of literary journalism in the finest tradition, a novelesque interweaving of vivid and telling detail with interviews and original research.

In the chapter “Water in the Desert,” Martínez profiles Mike Wilson, a member of the Tohono O’odham reservation, who makes a spiritual practice of leaving gallon jugs of water in the Baboquivari Valley, a deathtrap of thirst for uncounted hundreds of migrants. Not far from Wilson’s house are tract houses for a different kind of migrant — many of whom take a dim view of Wilson’s endeavor. Wilson named his various depots after the Gospels. After an exhausting day of following him around, writes Martínez:

“John Station is in the sun-dappled shade of a mesquite thicket, and with all the splashing from the ten-gallons containers and the hoses, soon there are diamonds of light glinting on every surface, drops of water whose brilliance disappears within seconds as the blazing air sucks the moisture away.”

Later, Martínez joins Wilson and a party of Guatemalans in a search for the body of a teenager named Sergio, whose cousin Lucas, residing in San Diego, learned had died two days into his journey from the border. In the car on the way to where they will start the search, Martínez learns that Sergio was 19. He was overweight; he carried a fake Mexican birth certificate. In Guatemala he’d driven a bus and gone into debt for the privilege. A husband and father already, he’d come north for fast cash. His body, Lucas had been told, “was left at the foot of a tree in a wash next to the highway to Arizona City, near a cemetery.” But after a brutal day of searching micro patches of immensity, Wilson, who knew the desert, said, at last, and in good Spanish, “Do you know how many places that could be?”

On the flip side of the coin, with “a postcard view of Baboquivari Peak,” on “640 acres of stunning Sonoran desert” is “a handsome house, 1920s vintage with Moroccan arches, tall ceilings and an exquisitely tiled kitchen,” where Martínez interviews its owner, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and carries a shotgun. Apart from the menace of rattlesnakes, migrants cross her land. At night, from the house, she can hear the rumbling of the Border Patrol SUVs.

“She visualizes them coming down the saddle between the two hills behind the ranch house. Walking up to the house, up to the bedroom window, peering in at her.

‘You must understand, Rubén. These are not Juan and María.’ They are, she says, like feral dogs.

I tense. There is a great contradiction between us, in the way we imagine who is on the land. Who is the figure crossing the desert?”

In “Where the River Bends,” Martínez arrives in Texas’ Big Bend country, to the tiny town of Marfa as a Lannan Fellow, assigned one of their several beautifully refurbished writers’ residences. He covers the basics of the art colony’s history as well if not better than anyone: the filming of the iconic Elizabeth Taylor-Rock Hudson-James Dean vehicle, “Giant”; the arrival of visionary artist Donald Judd, “mad emperor of the rectangles filled with the soul-stirring vistas of the Chihuhuan Desert,” and then, on Judd’s heels, the jet-in multimillionaires in search of space and creatives displacing the old ranching families. But more than a personal memoir or press release-fed bit of travel section fluff, Martínez delves in, hiking with Jeff Fort, ex-Tyco CEO who bought Judd’s fabled Chinati Hot Springs, among other and vast properties; and, recounted with often painful detail, Martínez attends a party at a sleek mansion surrounded by an ocean of plains and mountain views. And more: he looks into Marfa’s Blackwell School, which was the Mexican school — for Marfa’s public schools were not integrated until 1965. That famous scene in “Giant,” where Rock Hudson gets punched out by the waiter who had refused to serve Mexicans, was, alas, based on an ugly reality.

There are myriad ugly realities in the new West — migrants perishing in the deserts, unsustainable sprawl, conflicts, poverty, an epidemic of addiction — and while Martínez explores these, yielding powerful insight into the changing mosaic of peoples, he also shows us the magnet that is the West’s breathtaking beauty. And it all makes a symphony of sense. As Martínez writes in his introduction, “the only way to tell my story, it seemed, was to tell theirs.”

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Journal of Big Bend Studies: “The Secret Book by Francisco I. Madero”

Edna Ferber’s Giant & A Selection of Related Books,
Plus Two Related Videos On (Yes) the Nuremberg Trials

From the Archives:
A Review of Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire

From the Archives: “Some Old Friends Spark Joy (Whilst Kondo-ing My Library)”

BY C.M. MAYO — February 21, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

Originally posted July 31, 2017

I moved. And of course, this involved oodles of Kondo-ing.

For those who missed the phenomenon of Japanese tidying expert Marie Kondo: She says the way to do it is to pick up each object and ask yourself, does this spark joy? If so, keep it (even if it’s a raggedy T-shirt), and if not (even if it’s a brand new suede sofa that cost a heap), thank it, then chuck it— or donate it or sell it, or whatever, but get it out of your space. Many organizers and sundry pundits have dismissed Kondo-ing as “woo woo.” Too bad for them because, by Jove, by whatever Shinto spirit you want to name, or the god Pan, or Elvis Presley, it works.

My personal and working library is at last in good order, and I am delighted to share with you, dear and thoughtful reader, just a few of the many old friends that sparked much joy:

See this post that mentions the luminous Sara Mansfield Taber: “So How’s the Book Doing? (And how many books have you sold? And what was your print run?)”

Both of these books made my annual top 10 book read lists. 2011 Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and Living in Viet Nam ; 2014 Finding George Orwell in Burma. (Note: links goe to old blog platform; soon to be updated)

Post re: Bruce Berger’s amusing, eccentric and very sensitive artist’s memoir. I often quote from Rupert Isaacson’s The Healing Land in my literary travel writing workshops.

Taking the advice in Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit enabled me to finish my novel.

David Allen’s GTD saves the bacon every time.

Back in 2010 Regina Leeds contributed a guest-blog:“Five Plus 1 Resources to Make a Writer Happy in an Organized Space”. (Note: link goes to old blog platform; soon to be updated)

I have a sizable collection of books about books. Books for me are heaven. I wrote a bit about book history in my recent longform Kindle,“Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla” .

Sophy Burnham is best known for her works on angels, but she has a sizable body of outstanding work of literary essay / sociology. Her The Landed Gentry was especially helpful for me for understanding some of the characters in one of my books. Doormen by Peter Bearman… that merits a post…

Drujienna’s Harp was one of my very favorites when I was first starting to tackle reading young adult novels. As for The Golden Key, pictured right, my copy was left for some days by an open window in the rain back in 1960-something, but I have saved it, and I always shall.

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Meteor, Influences, Ambiance

Reading Mexico:
Recommendations for a Book Club of Extra-Curious
& Adventurous English-Language Readers

Una Ventana al Mundo Invisible (A Window to the Invisible World):
Master Amajur and the Smoking Signatures

From the Archives: My Review of Heribert von Feilitzsch’s “In Plain Sight: Felix A. Sommerfeld, Spymaster in Mexico, 1908-1914”

BY C.M. MAYO — February 7, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

Texas shares its southern border with the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas, so of course “Texas Books” must include those about the US-Mexico border. Soldiers, spies, civilians, weapons, and supplies going back and forth across that border played a crucial role in many conflicts, most especially the Mexican Revolution. This Monday’s post is a review of Heribert von Feilitzsch’s In Plain Sight: Felix A Sommerfeld, Spymaster in Mexico, a work I consider one of the most astonishing, original, and important contributions in recent years to the history of that Revolution— which first battle, the Battle of Juárez, was watched from the rooftops of El Paso, Texas.

* * *

IN PLAIN SIGHT:
FELIX A. SOMMERFELD, SPYMASTER IN MEXICO, 1908-1914
by Heribert von Feilitzsch
Henselstone Verlag, 2012
Review by C.M. Mayo originally published in Literal Magazine, October 2016

It was Mahatma Gandhi who said, “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.” Like Gandhi, Francisco I. Madero was deeply influenced by the Hindu scripture known as the Bhagavad-Gita and its concern with the metaphysics of faith and duty. And like Gandhi, Madero altered the course of history of his nation. From 1908, with his call for effective suffrage and no reelection, until his assasination in 1913, Madero received the support of not all, certainly, but many millions of Mexicans from all classes of society and all regions of the republic. But the fact is, during the 1910 Revolution, during Madero’s successful campaign for the presidency, and during Madero’s presidency, one of the members of that “small body of determined spirits,” who worked most closely with him was not Mexican. His name was Felix A. Sommerfeld and he was a German spy.

We must thank the distinguished historian of Mexico, Friedrich Katz, author of The Secret War in Mexico, among other works, for shining a bright if tenuous light on Felix Sommerfeld. Other historians of the Mexican Revolution have mentioned the mysterious Sommerfeld, notably Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler in their 2009 The Secret War in El Paso. But it is Heribert von Feilitzsch, by his extensive archival detective work in Germany, Mexico, and Washington DC, who has contributed our most complete—albeit still incomplete—understanding of who Sommerfeld was; Sommerfeld’s relationship with Madero; and his role, a vital one, in the Mexican Revolution.

Writes von Feilitzsch:

“No other foreigner wielded more influence and amassed more power in the Mexican Revolution. From head of security, Sommerfeld took on the development and leadership of Mexico’s Secret Service. Under his auspices, the largest foreign secret service organization ever to operate on U.S. soil evolved into a weapon that terrorized and decimated Madero’s enemies…”

While Sommerfeld was unable to prevent General Victoriano Huerta’s coup d’etat, and his warning to Madero escape arrest came too late, he himself escaped the capital. Continues von Feilitzsch:

“Sommerfeld became the lynchpin in the revolutionary supply chain. His organization along the border smuggled arms and ammunition to the troops in amounts never before thought possible, while his contacts at the highest eschelons of the American and German governments shut off credit and supplies for Huerta.”

Von Feilitzsch reveals that Sommerfeld was reporting not only to the German ambassador in Mexico City, Paul von Hintze, but from 1911 to 1914 to Sherburne G. Hopkins, lawyer and lobbyist par excellence in Washington. Hopkins had initially been brought on board for the cause by Madero’s brother and right-hand man, Gustavo Madero. To quote von Feilitzsch again:

“As a lawyer and lobbyist for industrialist Charles Ranlett Flint and oil tycoon Henry Clay Pierce, Hopkins enabled Sommerfeld to hold the entire keys for American businessmen trying to gain access to the Madero, Carranza, and Villa administrations.”

Sommerfeld was operating at the highest level of sophistication. And perhaps most telling of that sophistication is something surprisingly simple. It is a photograph of him taken in El Paso, Texas during the Revolution, the one that appears on the cover of von Feilitzsch’s book.

In a light-colored suit and dark tie, Sommerfeld stands at Madero’s elbow, protecting his back. On Madero’s opposite side journalists Allie Martin and Chris Haggerty crowd close, seemingly mesmerized by the glamorous revolutionary. Haggerty holds the brim of his hat, pale circle, as if he had only just swept it from his head. But on the other side, just slightly behind Madero, Sommerfeld, bareheaded, craggy-faced, with eyes that belong to an eagle, looks out— a secret service man’s gaze. It is an iconic photograph; those who study the Mexican Revolution will have seen it.

The telling thing, though, is this: that in the archive which has the original, the Aultman Collection in the El Paso Public Library, Sommerfeld, the man with the eagle-gaze, that man who so often appears right by Madero’s side, and here and there in other iconic photographs of the time, including one of the guests at the dinner with Madero and family to celebrate the Battle of Juárez, is unidentified. Or at least he was unidentified there at the time von Feilitzsch wrote his book. In short, during the Revolution, and for over a century to follow, Felix Sommerfeld had been hiding in plain sight. In Plain Sight: the title of von Feilitzsch’s book.

AN ESOTERIC CONNECTION?

I am more grateful than I can say to have encountered In Plain Sight when I did, and I believe that anyone who studies the Mexican Revolution, after reading this book, will say the same. The Mexican Revolution has thousands of facets, of course, but for my own work, the key questions were, Who was Francisco I. Madero? How, in the nitty-gritty, did he pull it off, to lead a Revolution and win the presidency? And, in the face of inevitable and ferocious counter-revolution, how did Madero manage to hold the presidency for as long as he did?

My work, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, was prompted by my encounter with Madero’s secret book, Manual espírita (Spiritist Manual). A blend of Kardecian Spiritism, Hindu and other esoteric philosophies, Manual espírita was published in 1911 under the pseudonym “Bhima.”

Never mind what was in Manual espírita, this slender volume with now yellowed pages: the fact that Francisco I. Madero, leader of the 1910 Revolution, had written it and moreoever, published it when he was president-elect in 1911— I could not but conclude that its contents must been exceedingly important to him, and hence, offer profound understanding into who he was and what he stood for.

But my intention here is not to talk about my book about Madero. I suffice to mention that, apart from benefitting so much from the information and insights in von Feilitzsch’s book, I took the liberty of emailing von Feilitzsch a question: What kind of person was this Sommerfeld—might he have been a Spiritist? For there was another German spy working closely with Madero, a Spiritist who turns out to have become a major figure in esoteric circles in the first half of the 20th century: Dr. Arnoldo Krumm-Heller.

Von Feilitzsch was kind enough to permit me to include his answer in my book. He writes:

“With respect to Madero’s Spiritism, Sommerfeld not only knew all about it. I am convinced that he was a kindred soul. I have scoured the earth for a book Sommerfeld wrote around 1918, likely under a pen name. I cannot find it. This might be the only possible source for a glimpse into this man’s deepest convictions and emotional structure. Sommerfeld became so close to Madero at the exact time, when Madero must have been under the most emotional pressure. Madero hated bloodshed and violence and exactly that he set off when the revolution started. In his innermost circle were Sommerfeld, [Arnoldo] Krumm-Heller, his wife Sara, and Gustavo, which is documented. … (Sommerfeld was [Sara’s] bodyguard in Mexico City and the last address I have for Sommerfeld reads: c/o Sara Madero, Mexico City. This was in 1930). Just like…Madero, Sommerfeld did not drink, gamble or smoke. In that time and considering the background of Sommerfeld as a mining engineer in the “Wild West,” this is a very unlikely coincidence. In his interviews with the American authorities, he said that Madero was “the purest man I ever met in my life. When I spoke to him, he took my breath away—the child’s faith of this man in humanity.” (Justice 9-16-12) In his appearance before the Fall Committee [of the US Senate] in 1912 he testified: “President Madero is the best friend I have in this world…” Senator Smith “…you became interested in him?” Sommerfeld: “Yes, we became very close friends.” And so on. I definitely hear undertones of esoteric connection. Sommerfeld was very private, rarely allowed a picture taken, and certainly never talked about his faith or personal life to anyone. As someone very rational he kept his distance to others and never described any other relationship in these highly emotional terms. Until I can put my hands on his personal papers or his book, these are only indications but still worth thinking about.”

MORE THAN WE MIGHT HAVE DARED HOPE FOR

In many ways Felix Sommerfeld remains a mystery. Von Feilitzsch however, has given us much more than we might have dared hope for: That Felix Sommerfeld was born on May 28, 1879 near Schniedemühl, then in Prussia. As owners of a grain mill, his family was relatively wealthy. Like many Germans in the late 19th century, he had relatives, including brothers, who emmigrated to the United States. As a teenager Felix lived with his brothers for a time in New York. He joined the US Army and received training in Kentucky—then went AWOL, back to Germany. In the first years of the 20th century von Feilitzsch finds Felix Sommerfeld serving in the Prussian cavalry in China during the Boxer Rebellion. Then, he pops up as a mining engineer in Arizona and then northern Mexico—perhaps by then already reporting to the German consul in Chihuahua. Then he’s back to Germany, then, back again in Mexico as a journalist—and all of a sudden, in charge of revolutionary leader Francisco I. Madero’s secret service.

One more of so many things von Feilitzsch brings to us about Felix Sommerfeld: He was Jewish. We do not know his fate, but if he lived into his sixties he may have perished in the Holocaust—or perhaps he disappeared, as secret agents know how to do.

In the Bhagavad Gita, which we know that Francisco Madero read and reread, penciling copious notes in the margins, Lord Kirshna, incarnation of cosmic power, advises the warrior Arjuna to have heart, to do his duty. For Madero, that meant putting aside material concerns and gathering around himself that “small body of determined spirits,” who would help him to alter the course of Mexico’s history. As Madero understood it, those “spirits” would have been both disincarnate and incarnate. Whether and to what degree his chief of secret service shared Madero’s esoteric inclinations remains an open question. But in revealing that, both during and beyond Madero’s lifetime, Felix Sommerfeld was an indispensible member of that “small body,” von Feilitzsch has made a contribution to the history of the Mexican Revolution that is at once disquieting and sensational.

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

From the Archives: My Review of Edward H. Miller’s
Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy

Synge’s The Aran Islands and Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus

Notes on Stephen L. Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute

“What Is a Film Outside the Audience’s Mind?” Notes on “George Stevens: Interviews”

BY C.M. MAYO — January, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

“I believe that if you make a film properly today, it’ll be watched by people in fifty years time”—George Stevens

Last month I devoted the first-Monday-of-the-month “Texas Books” post to several works related to the iconic movie Giant, which was based on Edna Ferber’s best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It’s nigh impossible to exaggerate the influence of that 1956 movie on shaping popular concepts and imagery of Far West Texas—although, strange to say, neither the author of the novel it was based on, nor the starring actors, nor the director of Giant were Texan. George Stevens (1904-1975), who won an Academy Award for Best Director for Giant, was a liberal Californian through-and-through. But unlike most of his fellow Hollywood directors, Stevens volunteered to serve in World War II, in which for a mobile film unit he documented, among other events and places, the liberation of Dachau. Two of the films he directed, The Nazi Plan (1945) and Nazi Concentration Camps (1945) were screened as evidence in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

Stevens, who got his start filming Laurel and Hardy comedies, and later directed such stars as Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, was to become one of Hollywood’s first major producer/ directors. However, his directing career was cleaved by World War II. Prior to the war, he made myriad light comedies and entertainments; afterwards, the serious and meticulously researched dramas, including Shane, the epic Giant, and The Diary of Anne Frank. As Stevens told one interviewer, “After seeing the camps I was an entirely different person.”

So who was this person, this Hollywood Californian, who had become another person whose vision of Texas in the mid-1950s has had such a powerfully lasting influence?

After last month’s “Texas Books” post on Giant I realized I needed to learn more about its director; specifically, to better see Giant in the context of his oeuvre. So— abebooks.com to the rescue—I put in an order for the now out-of-print collection of interviews edited by filmmaker and film historian Paul Cronin, George Stevens Interviews (University Press of Mississippi Press, 2004).

I devoured the editor’s excellent introduction, chronology and filmography, and all the interviews from 1935 to 1974— spanning nearly four decades.

A few quotes that stood out for me:

From the interview given to William Kirschner, Jewish War Veterans Review, August 1963:

[On the liberation of Dachau] “It was unbelievable. What is there to say about such enormities and abuse. A fellow in my unit who was something of a linguist wrote letters for the dying to their relatives without interruption for days and nights at a time. It was like wandering around in one of Dante’s infernal visions. (pp.18-19)

“Nothing has disturbed me in my life as much as the Hitler outrages. It’s the reason I got into the war, and I finally wound up in a concentration camp on the day it was liberated. I hated the German army. What they stood for was the worst possible thing that’s happened in centuries.” (p.21)

[On the wartime experience] “It was an elaborate change in my life… Professionally, I knew I wanted to do very different things to what I’d done before. In this respect, the film that was very important to me was The Diary of Anne Frank.” (p.21)

[On films in general] “The business of people gathered together in great numbers to look at a screen and agree or disagree upon ideas as acted out in front of them, I think it’s one of the great adventures of our time.” (p.23)

From the interview given to James Silke, Cinema, December-January 1964-65:

[On films in general] “I think all people are very curious about experiences, experiences that in this little life span they may not experience for themselves. A film is a remarkable way for people to experience things they would not have had the opportunity to experience in any other way. And I think the best in films occurs when they bring the response, ‘That’s it!'” (p.48)

From the interview given to Robert Hughes, 1967:

“This is what the theater does so well. People gathered in a large group, finding a little something about themselves. When the audience was truly moved, it was absolutely quiet. They were in communion because they were learning the truth about themselves. They were there for discivery, not entertainment. They say film is a narcotic, an escape. But when film was done right, it asked real questions: Who am I? Why am I? Why do I do this? Real theater and film is therapy for the audience.” (p.60)

[On Dachau] “After seeing the camps I was an entirely different person. I know there is brutality in war, and the SS were lousy bastards, but the destruction of people like this was beyond comprehension. This is where I really learned about life… We went to the woodpile outside the crematorium, and the woodpile was people. I remember there was a whole area for Yugoslavs. The only reason I knew they were Yugoslavs was because they had a tag on their coats or a broad purple crayon mark on their chests. There was a dissecting thing in the crematorium where they cut people apart before they put them in there.”(p.65)

From the interview given to Bruce Petri, 1973
(reprinted from A Theory of American Film: The Films and Techniques of George Stevens, Garland Publishing, 1987)

“So I keep the camera back in a position that is not going to help the audience too much…We’re curious creatures, and we like to discover for ourselves. In the world that we’re living in, in the film, the film is exposing life to you for your convenience. It must, to a degree, and it can under many situations without resentment; but I think it’s an enormous waste not to give the audience its priority of discovery, as much as you can.” (p.90)

From the interview for the American Film Institute, 1973:

[On Giant] “The structural development of the picture, I believe, is what saves it. It has an excellent structure design, which has to do with the audience anticipating and looking some distance ahead all the way to the finish, which is a reversal on how this kind of story would normally end— the hero is heroic. Here the hero is beaten, but his gal likes him. It’s the first time she’s ever really respected him because he’s developed a kind of humility— not instinctive, but beaten into him.” (p.102)

[On film in general] “It’s all about making sure the film bounces off that sheet and comes to life in the mind of the audience. What is a film outside the audience’s mind?” (p.104)

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Into the Guadalupe Mountains:
Some Favorites from the Texas Bibliothek
(Plus a Couple of Extra-Crunchy Videos)

The Marfa Mondays Podcast is Back! No. 21:
“Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson”

Lord Kingsborough’s Antiquities of Mexico

Edna Ferber’s “Giant” & A Selection of Related Books, Plus Two Related Videos On (Yes) the Nuremberg Trials

BY C.M. MAYO — December 6, 2021
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.

Without question the iconic image of Far West Texas in the 20th century and into our day in the 21st is that of James Dean in character as Jett Rink, sprawled in the back of an open automobile. Unless you were born yesterday, or grew up in, oh say, the highlands of Papua New Guinea, surely you will recognize it:

It is a still from Giant which was filmed on a stage-set, no longer extant, on a ranch just outside of Marfa, Texas. Here’s one of the many movie posters which incorporate the image:

And here’s a more recent DVD package cover:

And don’t think you can get away from James Dean-Jett Rink if you go to Marfa! Last time I was there, Giant was playing nonstop in the lobby of the Paisano Hotel, and there were postcards galore for sale featuring the James Dean-Jett Rink image. In Alpine, the town next-door (in Far West Texas next-door would be a half hour’s drive), the bookstore incorporates James Dean / Jett Rink into its logo:

The movie Giant, based on Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and starring James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, and directed by George Stevens, was a smash hit in 1956, and to this day it remains, in the words of film historian Don Graham, “probably the archetypal Texas movie; it contains every significant element in the stereotype: cowboys, wildcatters, cattle empire, wealth, crassness of manners, garish taste, and barbecue.”

Here’s my copy of Ferber’s novel:

The movie Giant now seems integral to the very weave of Texan cultural identity, yet when it was being filmed, many Texans who were familiar with the novel and its vociferous condemnation of prejudice and segregation, made threatening noises. One Texan told a Hollywood columnist, “If you make and show that damn picture, we’ll shoot the screen full of holes.”

For her saga of the family of cattle barons (Bick and Leslie Benedict, in the movie played by Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor) versus the upstart oilman (Jett Rink, played by James Dean), Ferber did her research—that would be another post. However, Ferber was no Texan, she was a liberal Jew originally from the Midwest, resident in Manhattan, member by the way of the Algonquin Roundtable, and she had made a career writing blockbuster ready-for-Hollywood novels. Texans generally came to embrace the movie Giant, but at the time the novel came out in 1952, the Texan attitude was more, Who was this highfalutin’ person to judge, never mind attempt to write about, Texas? Quoted in J.E. Smyth’s Edna Ferber’s Hollywood, one reader’s letter-to-the-editor of the Ladies Home Journal, which had serialized the novel, sputtered: “I thought I had heard very misconception of Texas and its people and every form of ridicule possible to small minds, but you have left me speechless with astonishment— such colossal ignorance I have never encountered.” Another reader claimed there was no racism in Texas, however, if any Texan “made the mistake of marrying a Mexican, she certainly would not be entertained in the living room”— and so on.

Apart from the James Dean scenes— all of them— the scene from the movie Giant that has echoed over the decades is the diner scene, also known as The Fight at Sarge’s Place. In Ferber’s novel, Mrs. Benedict (the cattle baron’s wife, played by Elizabeth Taylor), with her Mexican daughter-in-law and grandchildren, is refused service in a roadside café. From the novel:

“You can’t be talking to me!” Leslie said.

“I sure can. I’m talking to all of you. Our rule here is no Mexicans served and I don’t want no ruckus. So— out!”

In the movie, however, Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson) is with his wife Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor), the Mexican daughter-in-law, and the grandchildren. They have been seated, but when the owner, Sarge (played by Mickey Simpson) rudely refuses service to a Mexican family that came in after them, Bick protests. A slugfest with Sarge ensues, and the now elderly Bick ends up sprawled on the floor, unconscious. Sarge grabs his sign from the wall behind the cash register and throws it on top of Bick:

WE RESERVE
THE RIGHT
TO REFUSE SERVICE
TO ANYONE.

So it was in certain parts of the United States in the days before the Civil Rights Act— and that sign, in the words of Don Graham, “was the most famous emblem of racial discrimination in that era.” (Graham, Giant, p. 198)

Side note: Here’s my copy of Scene from the Movie GIANT by Tino Villanueva (Curbstone Press, 1993), an exquisite book-length poem about a 14 year old Mexican American boy watching that very scene in a movie theater.

From Tino Villanueva’s Scene from the Movie GIANT:

That a victory is not over until you turn it into words;

That a victor of his kind must legitimize his fists
Always, so he rips from the wall a sign, like a writ
Revealed tossed down to the strained chest of Rock Hudson.
And what he said unto him, he said like a pulpit preacher
Who knows only the unfriendly parts of the Bible.

After all, Sarge is not a Christian name. The camera
Zooms in:

WE RESERVE
THE RIGHT
TO REFUSE SERVICE
TO ANYONE

Here’s my copy of Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber, and the Making of a Legendary American Film by Don Graham:

Writes Don Graham in his history, Giant:

“[Director George] Stevens held a strong belief in racial equality, and he meant Giant to tell a story that would compel viewers of the film to consider their own prejudices instead of blaming them on other people. In Stevens’ mind, Giant would prompt people to examine their own hearts.” (p. 198)

George Stevens’s own heart had been opened as by a chainsaw.

In the decade before World War II he had been turning out feature films starring such legends as Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, Betty Grable, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers, James Stewart and Cary Grant. Then, to do his part in World War II, he set his career aside. For the US Army Signal Corps’ motion pictures unit, he filmed the Normandy Invasion, the liberation of Paris, and the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Writes Graham:

[W]hat Stevens saw in Germany was almost too much to absorb. He shot footage at Nordhausen, where the ravaged bodies of slave workers bore the grim evidence of starvation, torture, and murder. But Dachau was worse. There was nothing worse than Dachau. He shot boxcars packed with skeletal Jews; he shot ditches filled with the dead. He was in a world of indescribable horror. ‘We went to the woodpile outside the crematorium, and the woodpile was people.’ He filmed the extinct and the living. He filmed German officers and forced them to look at their handiwork, and he filmed German citizens, deniers all, in nearby villages, pretending they didn’t know what had been happening just down the road. He smelled the unbearable stench of the sick and the dying, and he saw signs of cannibalism among the heaped-up bodies.

“After seeing the camps,” he said, “I was an entirely different person.”

Stevens’ documentary films, including Nazi Concentration Camps, were entered as evidence in the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trials. When Stevens returned to Hollywood to make feature films, they were of a different order of seriousness. And these included the hard-hitting film based on Edna Ferber’s novel Giant.

From J.M. Smith’s Edna Ferber’s Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race and History:

“Stevens appreciated Ferber’s attack on Texas racism. He also shared Ferber’s commitment to creating unusual perspectives on the American past… His independent film company bought the rights in the summer of 1952, and then convinced Warmer Bros. to put up the money for the production and distribution… [Stevens’] desire to condemn racism and enshrine the old-style toughness of the western hero would result in a deeply conflicted western.” (pp.201-202)

The back cover of J.E. Smth’s Edna Ferber’s Hollywood shows Jett Rink’s creators, writer and actor:

It was on location in Marfa that Ferber, who was old enough to be his grandmother, became friends with the brilliant young actor from Indiana. It must have seemed that Jimmy Dean had a long stretch of life before him, but in fact he was living out his last days. He would die in a car crash in California while Giant was still in production. In Ferber: Edna Ferber and Her Circle, Julie Gilbert quotes Edna, saying that, once home, she had received from Jimmy a photograph of him in character as Jett Rink:

It was not characteristic of him to send his photograph unasked. I was happy to have it and I wrote to thank him: “… when it arrived I was interested to notice for the first time how much your profile resembles that of John Barrymore. You’re too young ever to have seen him, I suppose. It really is startlingly similar. But then, your automobile racing will probably soon take care of that.”

I was told that the letter came the day of his death. He never saw it. (p.148)

In a uncanny way, Giant has become James Dean’s film, and the image of him sprawled in the back of the automobile, wearing his crown of a Stetson, gloves loosely, as if royally, grasped, cowboy boots up, that monstrosity of a Potemkin construction in the distance, the whole of it a talisman of the pump-jack power of American cool. Wrongly so perhaps, but Ferber and Stevens are no longer household names, but relegated to mentions in scholarly works and footnotes.

What is that magic eros that James Dean had, that for all these many decades he has managed to spark and hold the passionate interest of not only so many movie viewers, but other actors, and writers and poets? One could explore that question from a variety of disciplines for 500 years and forever, but here’s one illuminating and entertaining work, co-edited by my amigo, Richard Peabody: Mondo James Dean: A Collection of Stories and Poems About James Dean.

PS: TWO VIDEOS ON THE NUREMBERG TRIALS

The Nuremberg Trials were very present for me when I was a teenager, in part because World War II was then relatively recent— the older people in my life, including my parents, had all lived through that war, and I knew many people who had come to the US as refugees—or their parents had come as refugees. Moreover, my high school French and German teacher (she taught both languages) had served as a translator at the Nuremberg Trials.

So when I learned that George Stevens’ filming had played such an important role in the Nuremberg Trials, I went a ways into looking for videos around that issue. Here are two that I would warmly recommend watching.

Ashton Gleckman’s “I Am the Last Surviving Prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials” The Story of Benjamin Ferencz:

Dr. Lee Merritt’s talk on Dr. Karl Brandt, who was condemned to death in the Nuremberg Trials. The story is complicated and important.

Look for my next Texas Books post on the first Monday of next month. You can find the archive of the Texas Books posts here.

You can also listen in any time to the 21 podcasts posted so far in my 24 podcast “Marfa Mondays” series exploring Far West Texas here.

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Francisco I. Madero’s Commentary on the Baghavad-Gita (or Bhaghavad-Gita)

13 Trailers for Movies with Extra-Astral Texiness

Remembering Ann L. McLaughlin

Newsletter & Cyberflanerie: Mexico Edition

BY C.M. MAYO — November 29, 2021
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

This finds me working away on my Far West Texas book which, unavoidably, concerns Mexico. Meanwhile, it’s time for the fifth-Monday-of-the-month newsletter and cyberflanerie, Mexico edition.

Delightful Mexico-related items have been landing in my mailboxes— both email and snailmail! First of all, the pioneering consciousness explorer and interviewer Jeffrey Mishlove has won the Bigelow Prize of USD $500,000—you read that right, half a million dollars— for his essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death.” The news relevant to Yours Truly and Mexico is that, in this essay, Mishlove mentions my work about Francisco I. Madero, the leader of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, who also happened to be a Spiritist medium. A few years ago in Las Vegas, I was also greatly honored when Mishlove interviewed me at length for his show, New Thinking Allowed.

You can read Mishlove’s award-winning essay “Beyond the Brain” in its mind-blowing entirety for free, and read more about the impressive panel of judges, and the also impressive runners-up for the Bigelow prize at this link.

Another delightful item to land in my mailbox in this drizzly-gray season was the pristine copy of Lloyd Kahn’s 1999 newspaper, El Correcaminos, Vol. 1. No. 1, Los Cabos, Baja California Sur. In the photo below, my writing assistant, Uli Quetzalpugtl, lends his presence to the wonderfulness! Gracias, Lloyd!

I’ve been a big fan of Lloyd Khan’s many endeavors (including this one) for some years now. Among other things, Kahn is the editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications. Check out his website and blog.

For me, reading this first 1999 issue of El Correcaminos was like stepping into a very personal time machine, for that was the year that, having concluded several years of intensively traveling and interviewing in and researching about that Mexican peninsula, I started polishing my draft of the manuscript that would appear as Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico (University of Utah Press, 2002).

Here’s a photo of El Correcaminos’ page of recommended books— ah ha! Anne Zwinger’s A Desert Country Near the Sea, Graham Mackintosh’s Into a Desert Place; Walt Peterson’s The Baja Adventure Book: These are some of the books I’d kept on my desk, and even carried with me on my travels. I’m smiling as I write this. How books can be like old friends! And sometimes their authors can become friends, too! (Hola, dear Graham!)

More Mexico news from Denver, Colorado: My amiga Pat Dubrava reads her translation of “The Magic Alphabet,” a short story by Mexican writer Agustín Cadena for Jill!

Dubrava and I both translate Cadena— he’s vastly under-appreciated in English, and we’re aiming to change that.

Mexican librarian and essayist Juan Manuel Herrera writes in Reforma about Mexico City’s esteemed rare book dealer, owner of the Librería Antigua Madero, Enrique Fuentes Castilla (March 30, 1940- March 8, 2021). I so admired and adored Don Enrique; I never considered my time in Mexico City well-spent without a visit to his Librería Madero. His passing is the passing of an era.

(Don Enrique was very helpful to me, and I wrote about him and Librería Madero a little bit in my long essay about the Mexican literary landscape, “Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla.”)

Another big part of the wonderfulness of Mexico City is its Centro de Estudios de Historia de México (CEHM) in the southern neighborhood of Chimalistac. Its director, historian Dr. Manuel Ramos Medina, reads a letter from the Empress Carlota to Señora Dolores de Almonte—this being one from the vast cornucopia of treasures in the CEHM’s archives. For those of you who speak Spanish and have an interest in Mexican history, check out the website for information of the innumerable free online lectures they offer.

My amigo Mexican writer Eduardo Zaráte has a fine new book of short stories: Cuentan las gentes (será cierto o no).

His wife, my amiga Araceli Ardón, a writer I have long admired and some of whose fiction I have translated, is offering a free series of outstandingly good lectures on Mexican literature and on her Ardón method of creative writing— in Spanish. Highly recommended.