This blog posts every Monday. Starting this year, every fourth Monday, except when not, is a Q & A with another writer. This week not.
As you dear, faithful, writerly readers know, I have been at work on the Far West Texas book. One of the individuals who appears and reappears throughout the narrative is Lt. John Bigelow, Jr. An officer in the Tenth U.S. Cavalry in the late 19th century, Bigelow had an illustrious father and his own impressive body of work in military strategy and tactics, in many ways anticipating the industrial-level wars of the twentieth century. So, having done a small Himalaya of reading on those Bigelows and the Tenth Cavalry, last fall at the conference at the Center for Big Bend Studies, I presented a paper on Lt. Bigelow, expecting to polish it up into publishable form lickety-split. Ha! It’s still not finished, but at least the draft is, and I submitted it. Wish me luck.
In the meantime, herewith, a few lessons learned
about working with a working library.
I’m several decades and several published books
down the pike now that I pause here, en blog, to confess that I never
fully appreciated what was involved with writing a book that necessitated a
working library. I just sort of accumulated whatever books I needed, or thought
I might need, willynilly, clearing bookshelf space, catch as catch can. Things
got rather pile-y, shall we say, and sometimes I wasted good working mornings
just hunting for things. I never fully appreciated how unwieldly some of
these working libraries can grow– and grow as, in many cases, they rightfully
must.
Some of my working libraries took up only a few
shelves, for example, the reading for my anthology Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary
Companion. The one for my Baja California book, Miraculous Air, took
up an entire wall, floor to ceiling, and the working library for my novel on
Mexico’s Second Empire almost twice as much space. Ditto my recent
book on Madero and
metaphysical religion. And… drumroll… most especially the
one I am using now on Far West Texas. The Texasbibliothek, as I call it, now
hogs and camels and elephants and Macktrucks an entire room.
You may wonder, why can’t I just borrow books from
my local library? Answer, Part I: I don’t have a relevant library nearby. Part
II: When I am writing I often need to have several different books at-hand;
many libraries will not lend out so many books at once, nor bring out so many
volumes to a reading room. (But yes, I have consulted books in libraries, and
in archival collections.) As I worked on that Baja California book, the Second
Empire novel, and the one on the Mexican Revolution, I often had five or ten or
even as many as, say, fifteen books open on my desk… such is the
Kuddelmuddel of my process.
So… for the types of books I was and am writing, this means having a budget– a realistic budget– for buying books. University press hardcovers can be, ouch. To save money, many a time I bought an ex-library edition off of www.abebooks.com— which for used books is, in my experience, more reliable than amazon or ebay. And for collectible editions, I would advise steering way clear of amazon and ebay because all sorts of sellers on there have no clue what a first edition is or how to accurately describe a book’s condition. Again, abebooks.com is good and better yet sellers who are members in good standing of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. An occupational danger is that you can get a jones for collecting, and start buying first editions. But that’s another blog post. I used to buy Italian shoes, let me put it that way.
As for organizing these working libraries, I posted previously about that here. Indeed, I got this current working library, my Texasbibliothek, into such superb shape that, as I was pulling out various titles for this paper on Lt. Bigelow, I had a little fiesta of self-congratulation every single time.
And reshelving the books? Something I do now with this Texasbibliothek that I have never done before– and I am shaking my head that it had not occurred to me sooner– is to tuck into each book a bookmark with its category.
UPDATE: See my November 11, 2019 post “A Working Library” for more about using bookmarks. My technique has advanced!
Making individual bookmarks with the categories
noted might seem more trouble than it’s worth, but the challenge is, many books
could go into more than one category, and if I have to remember or decide anew
which one it is each time I reshelve it, well…. then… unshelved books tend
to start piling up and sprawling into big, giant, King-Kong-scale
Kuddelmuddel!
Decluttering? Indeed I do declutter. However, for some subjects, as in these working libraries, the collections in themselves have significant cultural / scholarly value; they should not be broken up. One day I will find them a good home.
As of this year, 2018, the second Monday of the month is dedicated to my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing.
Unintentional repetition of a word or phrase in your writing is rather like going out the door with another sweater clinging to the back of your sweater — uh, dorky. Or smiling wide– with a piece of spinach stuck between your front teeth. It’s the sort of thing we all do on occasion, and that is why we need to revise, revise, revise.
Intentional repetition on the other hand, can bring in the bongo-drums of musicality! Here are some examples of this powerful poetic technique:
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“Man lives in the flicker, Man lives in the flicker.” — Mark Slade, “The New Metamorphosis” Mosaic 8 (1975), quoted in Marshal McLuhan, “Man and Media,” transcript of a talk delivered in 1979, in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews (MIT Press, 2005).
“Wanting to be read, wanting the recognition, whether its Jacqueline Susan-style, all glitz and limos, or sweeping the gland slam of literary events, is not a crime.” — Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees
“You have also never said one word about my poor little Highland book my only book. I had hoped that you and Fritz would have liked it.” — Queen Victoria (letter to her daughter, 23/12/1865)
“Tancredi, he considered, had a great future; he would be the standard-bearer of a counter-attack which the nobility, under new trappings, could launch against the social State. To do this he lacked only one thing: money; this Tancredi did not have; none at all. And to get on in politics, now that a name counted less, would require a lot of money: money to buy votes, money to do the electors favors, money for a dazzling style of living…” — Guiseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard
“I saw Master Kelley put of the base metal into the crucible, and after it was set a little upon the fire, and a very small quantity of the medicine put in, and stirred with a stick of wood, it came forth in great proportion perfect gold, to the touch, to the hammer, to the test.” —Edward Dyer, quoted in Patrick Harpur, The Philosopher’s Secret Fire
Thanks to the Battle of Hastings of 1066!
Because it is a blend of languages, mainly Anglo-Saxon and Norman French,
English offers unusual facility for diction drops and spikes, and you, dear
writerly reader, if you care to dare, can employ these for a richly dazzling
array of effects. Irony, comedy, sarcasm, intimacy, poignancy, revelation,
poetry, punch, sass, shock… it’s a long list and I’m sure that you can make
it longer.
Here, taken from a few favorite books and blogs, are some examples of diction spikes– that is, a sudden rise in the level of formality of vocabulary and syntax (wherein it all gets very elliptically Latinate)– and drops– gettin’ funky with the grammar and using short, sharp words.
See if you can spot the spikes and drops. I
separate them out for you below the quotes.
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“What then, does one do with one’s justified anger? Miss Manners’ meager arsenal consists only of the withering look, the insistent and repeated request, the cold voice, the report up the chain of command and the tilted nose. They generally work. When they fail, she has the ability to dismiss inferior behavior from her mind as coming from inferior people. You will perhaps point out that she will never know the joy of delivering a well-deserved sock in the chops. True– but she will never inspire one, either.”
SPIKE:“What then, does one do with one’s justified anger? Miss Manners’ meager arsenal consists only of the withering look, the insistent and repeated request, the cold voice, the report up the chain of command and the tilted nose.”
DROP :“sock in the chops”
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“Department of Transportation engineers explained that aluminum highway signs bore a chemical film which kept them from oxidizing. And that the film over time formed a halo effect, a light-purple tinge which migrated to stress points on the metals’ surface. The regional maintentance engineer didn’t think the sign looked a bit like the Virgin, by the way. You must of had to use your imagination. Though maybe, he admitted, he was unenlightened. The manager of the plant that supplied the aluminum sheets assured everyone that they weren’t treated by monks or anything. It was done by a bunch of folks in Alabama.”
SPIKE: “Department of Transportation engineers explained that aluminum highway signs bore a chemical film which kept them from oxidizing. And that the film over time formed a halo effect, a light-purple tinge which migrated to stress points on the metals’ surface.”
DROP: “…didn’t think the sign looked a bit like the Virgin, by the way. You must of had to use your imagination…”
SPIKE: “The manager of the plant that supplied the aluminum sheets assured everyone…”
DROP: “…they weren’t treated by monks or anything. It was done by a bunch of folks in Alabama.”
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“As I thought about composing a new blog post over the past couple of weeks, I resisted the idea of writing about wildfire, even as the topic claimed a growing share of mind day after day. For one thing, I’ve touched the subject before. For another, yet another blog bemoaning the lack of precipitation seemed tiresome. Plus, well, geez: fires are such a downer.”
SPIKE: “…bemoaning the lack of precipitation seemed tiresome.”
DROP:“Plus, well, geez: fires are such a downer.”
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“When I was a young man in the 1970s, New York was on its ass. Bankrupt. President Gerald Ford told panhandling Mayor Abe Beame to ‘drop dead.’ Nothing was being cared for. The subway cars were so grafitti-splattered you could hardly find the doors or see out the windows. Times Square was like the place Pinocchio grew donkey ears. Muggers lurked in the shadows of Bonwit Teller on 57th and Fifth. These were the climax years of the post-war (WWII) diaspora to the suburbs. The middle class had been moving out of the city for three decades leaving behind the lame, the halt, the feckless, the clueless, and the obdurate ‘risk oblivious’ cohort of artsy bohemians for whom the blandishments of suburbia were a no-go state of mind. New York seemed done for.”
SPIKE: “These were the climax years of the post-war (WWII) diaspora to the suburbs. The middle class had been moving out of the city for three decades leaving behind the lame, the halt, the feckless, the clueless, and the obdurate ‘risk oblivious’ cohort of artsy bohemians for whom the blandishments of suburbia were a no-go state of mind.”
Starting this year, every fourth Monday I post a
Q & A with a fellow writer. This month’s Q & A is with Lynn Downey, my fellow Women Writing the West
member, apropos of the news that her book Life in a Lung Resort
will be published next year by University of Oklahoma Press.
Lynn Downey is a widely-published historian of the West, with
degrees in history and library science from San Francisco State University and
the University of California, Berkeley. She has published books and articles on
the history of jeans, the treatment of tuberculosis in California, American art
pottery, and the history of Arizona. She was the Historian for
Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco for twenty-five years. Her biography of
the company’s founder, Levi Strauss:
The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World,was published
by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2016, and won the 2017 Foreword
Reviews silver INDIE award for Biography. Her next book, Life in a
Lung Resort, is the history of an early 20th century
women’s tuberculosis sanatorium in California where her grandmother received
treatment in the 1920s. In 2012 Lynn received a Charles Donald O’Malley
Short-Term Research Fellowship from the Special Collections Division of the
David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles,
where she studied the history of tuberculosis treatment. Lynn now works as a
historical/archival consultant and exhibition writer, and is also a board
member of the Frank Lloyd Wright Marin County Civic Center Conservancy. She
lives in Sonoma County, California.
C.M. MAYO: On organizing research: Any lessons learned from your previous book? And lessons learned from this one? Also, are there basic mistakes first time writers oftentimes make in organizing their research?
LYNN DOWNEY: Organizing research
materials — whether for fiction or non-fiction — is a very personal thing.
And I think it depends on your life and educational experience. I’m 63 years
old, and I loved researching and writing history from my very first term paper
in the 5th grade. I’m also an archivist, so I like to keep paper files for the
most part, and that has worked for me on all the books I’ve written.
My last book, Levi Strauss:
The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World, posed the greatest
challenge because it was the longest and most detailed book I’ve ever written.
I used to organize my research materials by chapter– just throw all notes,
copies of articles, etc. into files by chapter. But that ended up being
cumbersome. So I started keeping files by subject or topic, and also kept a
running list of what topics would go into each chapter. I could then put my
hands on a subject easily.
But again, when it comes to research, I don’t
know of anything first time writers could do that would be called a
“mistake.” The best way to organize research is to find what works
for you. That might mean doing down a few paths that lead nowhere — like I did
— but as long as you find a method that helps you write, that’s the important
thing. Research must serve the writer, not the other way around.
C.M. MAYO: On research files: What happens to them when you are finished with the book? How do you store them? Do you give them to an archive? (Do you have any related advice for other writers with books that required significant original research?)
LYNN DOWNEY: I keep my research materials for quite awhile after a book is published, because I sometimes need them again: for interviews, for follow-up articles, etc. All of my files for the Levi Strauss biography will go back to the company eventually. I was the Levi Strauss & Co. Historian for 25 years and did all of my research while I was on the job. I wrote the book after I retired but the materials actually belong to the company and they will go back there once I have a moment to throw them in my car and take them to San Francisco. Once I no longer need the research files I used for my book A Short History of SonomaI will give them to the Sonoma Valley Historical Society. My advice is to not jettison your files too quickly after you finish a book. They can still come in handy.
C.M. MAYO: What were some of the more interesting books you read in the process of writing your book? (And would you recommend them?)
LYNN DOWNEY: My book is a
history of the Arequipa tuberculosis sanatorium for women in northern
California, where my grandmother was treated in the 1920s. It was in business
from 1911-1957. In addition to doing a number of oral history interviews with
former patients, I read a lot of books about the history of TB treatment, how a
cure was finally found, and about San Francisco history. The sanatorium’s
founder was a male doctor named Philip King Brown but his mother was Dr.
Charlotte Brown, one of San Francisco’s first female surgeons. She taught him
to value women’s health, and most of the doctors who treated the patients at
Arequipa were women. I did read some extraordinary books to prepare to
write.
C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about your working library?
LYNN DOWNEY: I have a bookcase in
my office where I keep all the books needed for my current project. Sometimes I
have to pile them on the floor too, but at least they are all in one place!
When I finish a project they get moved to one of the five other bookcases I
have in my house, and the books for the next project go into my office. I also
have filing cabinets in my office for my working files: the subject files I
mentioned earlier. Sometimes I have more than will fit in the cabinet and that
means I have banker’s boxes on the floor, too.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive writer for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, Facebook, Twitter, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
LYNN DOWNEY: The best thing about
the digital revolution for a historian like me is the availability of historic
newspapers online. Sites like Newspapers.com, Genealogybank.com, and the
Library of Congress Chronicling America site have fully searchable databases.
These are the only places that have a “siren call” for me. I have
spent many hours in my pajamas in front of my computer following a research
rabbit hole on these sites!
The other digital distractions really don’t get
to me. Maybe it’s because I’m older and did not grow up with the instant
availability of communication and information that we have now. After years of
doing research and writing I am able to focus easily and not get distracted. I
really don’t know how to advise someone how to do that, though. Like research,
finding a method to stay on track is very personal. Some people I know keep a
timer by their computer, and they can’t check email or social media until they
hear the bell after an hour is up.
There’s no single fix for what society throws at
us, and what society expects us to do. Which I think is part of the problem.
We’re supposed to be constantly checking up on everyone who wants to
communicate with us. But my work and my time are important. I’ll check email
now and then while I’m working, and if there are no emergencies I go back to
what I’ve been working on.
The joy of research, of writing, of getting the
best words on the page far outweighs the need to have a constant connection in
cyberspace.
C.M. MAYO: Did you experience any blocks while writing this book, and if so, how did you break through them?
LYNN DOWNEY: Honestly, I don’t really get blocks. That was especially true with Life in a Lung Resort because it’s a personal and family story as well as a work of history. I spent decades working full-time and commuting and only had weekends to do my writing. Blocks were not an option, and they also just didn’t arise. I was so happy to be at my desk working on projects I loved.
C.M. MAYO: Back to a digital question. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
LYNN DOWNEY: Do
you mean writing longhand instead of on the computer? I did both with this book
as well as all my others. Sometimes when I couldn’t get a topic to gel while
writing on my laptop, I would switch to a pen and paper. This uses a completely
different part of the brain and it always works. Once I was really stuck trying
to get a difficult chapter started. I live 20 minutes from the ranch where
writer Jack London lived (it’s now a State Park). So I went to the ranch, sat
on a picnic table near London’s house, took out a pad of paper and a pen and
started to write. Forty-five minutes later I had my chapter opening and a good
start on the rest of it.
I also collect vintage typewriters and I have one
that I use now and then; again, to work another part of my brain to keep my
writing from going stale.
C.M. MAYO: Do you keep in active touch with your readers? If so, do you prefer hearing from them by email, sending a newsletter, a conversation via social media, some combination, or snail mail?
LYNN DOWNEY: I haven’t yet found a
good way to keep in touch with readers, but I give a lot of lectures about my
books and often keep in touch with people who have come to hear me speak. I am
working with my website designer to make it easier for people to communicate
with me, and I hope to do more when Life in a Lung Resort comes out. I
am happy to hear from readers any way they like: email, social media, whatever.
LYNN DOWNEY: Women are often seen
as the second-class-citizens of western writing, whether fiction or
non-fiction. The West is so often portrayed as a male domain but women have so
much to say about this region! When I heard about Women Writing the West I
joined up right away. We have to stake our claim here, girls.
If you know who Jaron Lanier is you will understand why he, and probably only he, can get away with such a title for a commercially published book, a title that most people today, and that would include writers with books to promote, would consider hoot-out-loud humbug.
But perhaps they would not if they more fully understood the perverse and toxic nature of the machine Lanier terms BUMMER.
BUMMER = Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made Into an Empire for Rent
Writes Lanier:
“BUMMER is a machine, a statistical machine that lives in the computing clouds. To review, phenomena that are statistical and fuzzy are nevertheless real.”
And more:
“The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes. Here I have put forward a hypothesis that our problem is not the Internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms. Instead, the problem that has made the world so dark and crazy lately is the BUMMER machine, and the core of the BUMMER machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people.”
BUMMER sounds like science fiction. But alas, as
Lanier explains, the business plan behind social media, and the use of proprietary
algorithms to hook users into addiction and subtly distort and shape
interactions among users, is both real and seriously icky. You’ve probably read
or heard something about FaceBook’s shenanigans, but in Lanier’s Ten
Arguments you’re getting a far broader, more detailed analysis and
argument, in a wierdly charming package, and not from some random TED pundit,
but from one of the fathers of the industrial-cultural complex now known as
Silicon Valley.
Call me a pessimist: I doubt that Lanier’s book will have any more influence on the general public’s social media habits than did Mander’s on television watching, which came out in the late 1970s. But perhaps such works may assist you in marshaling your attentional power for your creative endeavors, as they did for me, and for this reason I enthusiastically recommend them to you, dear writerly readers.
Carpe diem.
BUT BY THE WAY…
I have not deleted my social media accounts. What I have done is deactivate FaceBook (back in 2015), abandon Twitter (totally, 2021) and now only very rarely participate on LinkedIn and academia.edu, mainly to announce a publication. While I agree with Lanier’s argument that social media is perverse and and toxic, and I sincerely wish that I had never signed up for FB and Twitter in the first place, the fact is, I did, and because of that existing online record and username, I am not ready to hit the delete button. Moreover, I am still digesting some parts of his argument (in particular, I do not accept his hypothesis that the problem is merely what he terms BUMMER).
And, yes, I know, this blog, on the Google platform, blogger, belongs to BUMMER. A better and paid platform is on my to-do list. [UPDATE January 2019: Here at last this blog is on self-hosted WordPress at www.madam-mayo.com]
As for using Google search– definitively
BUMMER– I switched to Duckduckgo as
my go-to search engine a good while ago.
What’s the specific strategy that would be right
for you? I would not presume to say.
But what is clear— and we don’t need Mr Lanier to inform us on this simple point— is that if you want to write anything substantive, and you don’t have the abracadabradocity to summon up more than 24 hours in each day, social media can be a lethal time-suck. The years will scroll by, as it were… and funny how that is, though you Tweet #amwriting often enough, you never wrote what you planned to write…
What’s more, the visibility you can achieve with social media, and the sense of “community,” albeit intermediated by proprietary algorithms of a corportation, are Faustian bargains: you will pay in the end, and on many levels.
P.S. For those who have the inclination and/or sufficient cootie-proofing to handle esoterica, I can also recommend philosopher Jeremy Naydler’s splendidly researched and elegantly argued In the Shadow of the Machine: The Prehistory of the Computer and the Evolution of Consciousness— also just published. You might find it worthwhile to keep in mind, if you read In the Shadow of the Machine, that in his Ten Arguments Jaron Lanier mentions (oh so briefly, blink and you’ll miss it) Waldorf schools. (More about that connection here.)
As I mosey along with my book about borderlands Far West Texas I have become increasingly fascinated by the interweavings of the imaginal realm and the real, that is, how novels, television shows and movies are inspired by and in turn shape our ideas about this place, its people, and its history. (See my previous post, “Thirteen Trailers for Movies with Extra-Astral Texiness.”) I have also been pondering the ways in which the digital revolution has transformed the experience of travel itself, conflating, multilayering, and pretzeling time and space. (See my post on “Literary Travel Writing: Notes on Process and the Digital Revolution.”) And I’ve been noodling on technology (see “Notes on Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey.”)
So no surprise, I have ended up, willy by nilly,
crunching through the ouevre of Marshall McLuhan.
For anything to do with media, Marshall McLuhan is your superstar go-to guy. He’s wild, brilliant, cryptic until you realize just how very brilliantly inside-out brilliant, and spookily prophetic. His famous saying was, “the medium is the message.” His arguably most famous book, however, is titled The Medium is the Massage.
An excellent introduction to his work is this video on the Marshall McLuhan Speaks website. It opens with his cameo in the Woody Allen film, “Annie Hall,” then goes to an approximately 20 minute introduction by Tom Wolf.
This year I’ve been posting a Q & A with a
fellow writer on the fourth Monday of the month, and while I have every
intention of continuing to do so, this Monday instead herewith some notes on
the epic novel by the artist who, back in 2001, passed over to the Great
Beyond: Tom Lea.
“It is part and parcel of your culture and I
think you should cherish it,” says Italian art historian
Luciano Cheles of the surprisingly little-known works of El Paso, Texas painter
and writer Tom Lea. And encouraging that is precisely what Adair Margo has been
doing with great verve for the past many years with the website and educational
programs of the Tom Lea
Institute. I had the immense privilege of attending Margo’s talk
about Tom Lea at the Bullock Museum in Austin back on October 15, 2015. (And by
felicitous happenstance, I sat next to Luciano Cheles.) More about that anon.
Here is the must-see 5 minute video with what
Cheles has to say about Lea’s artwork:
For more on Lea’s and The
Wonderful Country’s place in the canon, see Marcia Hatfield Daudistel’s
majestic anthology, Literary El Paso
(TCU Press, 2009).
WILDEST WEST EL PASO
This post is prompted by my work-in-progress about Far West Texas (…stay tuned for more podcasts…) At long, belated last I have tackled Tom Lea’s epic historical novel of El Paso.
I am happy to report that The Wonderful Country is wonderful indeed, a masterpiece not only of works set in El Paso, but in the genre of the Western, and indeed in all of American fiction.
These days most literary readers, and especially those out on the coasts, tend to turn their noses up at Westerns. Dear curious and adventurous reader, if that describes you, be assured that to overlook reading The Wonderful Country is to miss out on something very fine in U.S. literary heritage. The Wonderful Country was popular in its day, back in the 1950s, but it is not a typical commercial novel; it has a high order of literary quality; morever, its treatment of Mexicans and Mexico is unusually knowing and sensitive. (What would I know about that? Start here and here; my books are all here).
Set in post-Civil War El Paso, that is, the
latter part of the nineteenth century, the first days of the railroad and the
last of the free-roaming Apache, and published in the pre-Civil Rights era,
Lea’s The Wonderful Country forthrightly portrays many of the still
painful tensions in the border region. While he writes with an unusually open
heart and mind, Lea is scrupulous in rendering accurate period detail. The
“N” word appears! (In the mouth of a character.) There is no lack of
roastin’ ‘n stabbin’ n’ shootin’ n’ scalpin’ and our hero is the son of a
Confederate from Missouri. Vegetarians and those with flea-trigger hot-buttons,
be forewarned.
From the catalog copy, TCU Press, 2002:
“Tom Lea’s The Wonderful Country opens as mejicano pistolero Martín Bredi is returning to El Puerto [El Paso] after a fourteen-year absence. Bredi carries a gun for the Chihuahuan war lord Cipriano Castro and is on Castro’s business in Texas. Bredi fears he will be arrested for murder once he is back across the Rio Grande. Fourteen years earlier– shortly after the end of the Civil War–when he was the boy Martin Brady, he killed the man who murdered his father and fled to Mexico where he became Martín Bredi.
“Back in Texas, other misfortunes occur to Brady. First he breaks a leg; then he falls in love with a married woman while recuperating; and, finally, to right another wrong, he kills a man.
“When Brady / Bredi returns to Mexico, the Castros distrust him as an American, and Martin is in the intolerable position of being not a man of two countries but a man without a country.
“The Wonderful Country is marvelous in its depiction of life along the Texas/Mexico border of a century-and-a-half ago. Lea brings to life a time that was wild, a time when Texas and Mexico were being settled and tamed. Lea knows the desert region of his birth as well as anyone who has ever written about El Paso and the great nation that borders it to the south.”
NOTES ON THE TCU PRESS EDITION WITH AN AFTERWORD
BY JOHN O. WEST
You should be able to scare up a first edition
over on www.abebooks.com,
and power to you if you want to shell out the clams for a fine first with
intact dustjacket and an autograph. The copy I read is the paperback
reprint of 2002 available from TCU Press (and most online
booksellers) which includes afterword by John O. West, a noted US-Mexico border
scholar. For West’s afterword I would recommend the TCU Press paperback as your
best buy (unless your main goal, buck for buck, is to beat the stock market).
As far as I know, all editions include the
elegant and evocative drawings Lea made to head each chapter.
John O. West argues, and I concur:
“The story of Martin Brady is that of Thomas Wolf’s You Can’t Go Home Again, of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; the setting in the desert Southwest gives it particular realism, but the theme makes it speak beyond the region where it grew.”
West also provides some illuminating background
on the inspirations for the novel. My additional notes below.
NOTES ON THE PLACE, THE PEOPLE, AND THE EVENTS
THAT INSPIRED THE NOVEL, PLUS SOME RELATED RECENT WORKS & WEBSITES
Tom Lea’s “El Puerto” is based on El Paso; Fort Jefflin, clearly inspired by Fort Bliss.
El Paso pioneer W.W. Mill’s memoir Forty Years at El Paso, 1858-1898 was Tom Lea’s major inspiration. A first edition is pricey! But it is out-of-copyright now so you can read a digitalized edition for free online.
W. H. Timmons’ El Paso: A
Borderlands History (Texas Western Press, 1990). Back in the
1960s, Timmons served as Chairman of the History Department at the University
of Texas El Paso.
Fort Bliss actually moved around the El Paso region
quite a bit in the 19th century, but you can visit the current Fort Bliss,
which has an adobe museum and a modern museum– the latter perhaps of most
interest for WWII aficionados. The historic parade grounds, surrounded by
stately houses for senior officers, are well worth a visit.
Some of the characters in The Wonderful
Country are inspired by (or mighty similar to) some real people, among
them:
Both the U.S. Army and the Mexican Army went after the Apaches, and in some instances, U.S. forces chased Apaches into Mexico. In general such US Army forays seem to have been welcomed by the Mexicans, but communications in these remote areas were dicey and resentments still very raw after the US-Mexican War. Many historians writing in English about border history have not had the wherewithall to research Spanish language sources, and vice versa, so there is some low-hanging fruit here for those historians with cross-border cultural and language skills. The Apaches also have something to say about it. One recent biography of note is Kathleen P. Chamberlain’s Victorio: Apache Warrior and Chief (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).
The hero of The Wonderful Country becomes
a Texas Ranger. A crucial source for Lea, writing back in the 1950s, was James
B. Gillett’s 1921 memoir, Six Years with
the Texas Rangers: 1875-1881, from which Lea takes the epigraph and
his title:
“Oh, how I wish I had the power to describe
the wonderful country as I saw it then.”
> Check out Gilett’s page at
the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame and Museum in Waco, Texas. Gillett
ranched south of Alpine and upon moving to Marfa helped found the West Texas
Historical Association. He died in 1937 and is buried in Marfa.
(The Texas Rangers made up a more heterogeneous
group than some too easily conclude. See also the 2014 book by historian
Cynthia Leal Massey, Death of a Texas
Ranger. An interview with Massey is here.)
TENTH UNITED STATES CAVALRY
Marcos Kinevan’s superb (of partial) biography of Lt. John Bigelow, Jr. of the Tenth U.S. Cavalry in Texas
The Wonderful Country has
a number of characters who serve in the Tenth U.S.
Cavalry. The Tenth was famed for its African American
“Buffalo” soldiers, and its exploits in fighting Indians, especially in
Texas and then Arizona.
Less famous, but undeservedly so, is Lt. John Bigelow, Jr., who is the subject of a forthcoming paper I presented at last year’s Center for Big Bend Studies Conference. His younger brother, Poultney Bigelow, who published his series of articles on trailing the Apaches, was a great friend of artist Frederic Remington who illustrated many of the articles. Their father, John Bigelow, was an accomplished editor (at one point editing the New York Times), he served as President Lincoln’s ambassador to France, and had much to do with the founding of the Republican Party, the New York Public Library, the Panama Canal, and promoting Swedenborgianism. Bigelow, Sr also entertained literary celebrities including Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. My paper explores some of the family’s rich and varied social and political connections, John Bigelow Jr’s reports for Poultney’s magazine, his role as a nexus between the Eastern establishment and the West, and his importance as a military intellectual who anticipated the profound changes to come in 20th century warfare.
NOTES ON THE 1959 MOVIE “THE WONDERFUL
COUNTRY” BASED ON THE NOVEL
… Reminds me of that old
joke about the goats out browsing on a hill in Hollywood. They find the can
with the reel of film, they kick it open, and they start munching… The one
goat says to other, well, whaddya think? The other goat chews some more.
“Eh,” the goat says, “I liked the novel better.”
One of the African American “Buffalo
soldiers” is played by baseball star Satchel Paige. Tom Lea himself has a
cameo as the barber, Peebles.
“Writing is a kind of burden to me, which painting is not. I sweat and stew and fight painting, but I am not overwhelmed… by problems like I was with writing. I taught myself to write and never had any kind of a mentor or formal course… I taught myself to write by reading, reading good stuff.”
On The Wonderful Country:
“…I wanted to do something that ad been on my mind since I was a kid: Write about this borderland and the people on both sides of the river.”
“When traveling down in Mexico I never carried anything more than a little notebook because I was trying to train myself to hear rather than to see. I was trying so hard to be a good writer, you know… The hardest chapter in that book was where Martin goes with Joe Wakefield across the river in the springtime. I was trying to tell how much this fellow felt about both sides of the river. I remember I struggled and struggled for some way to express springtime and I settled it by saying, ‘A mockingbird sang on a budded cottonwood’ or something like that. I had to watch myself about using the big word. I always chose the shortest way if it could say exactly what I wanted.”
“A gust of wind sished sand against the one small windowpane.” (p.16)
“They ate in the light of tallow dips, a dozen men in soggy leather, laughing and chewing, with the rain sounding on the roof, and cold drops leaking through.” (p.250)
“Slowly, under the winking high stars, they came to where they saw beyond the paleness of the sand the darkness of the brush that lined the river, and they rode toward it. They worked across a dry flat of alkali white in the starlight, with the hooves scuffling the crust in the windless silence. ” (p.306)
FURTHER MISC NOTES
From Tom Lea Month 2012, Nick Houser on Lea’s Cabeza de Vaca picture:
In my opinion, Lea’s masterwork is his 1938 mural
“The Pass
of the North” which is in El Paso Historic Federal Courthouse
Building.
NOTES ON HIS FAMILY
Lea’s father was Tom Lea
(1877-1945), who served as mayor of El Paso during the Mexican
Revolution. (Alas, many Mexicans and Mexican Americans do not remember Mayor
Lea fondly; this is
one reason why.)
Of late American readers have been well served by a veritable cottage industry of works about the Roman Republic and Empire, and their respective falls, and various aspects thereof, and what lessons we, with our republic (or empire, as some would have it), purportedly at the precipice of analogous fiscal, ecological, military, social and/or political Seneca Cliffs, might learn from them. History may not repeat itself any more than we can wade into the same river twice, but, of course, we can step into rivers that look more than a sight familiar. Sometimes a nicely behaved river—let’s dub it the Goth Swan—turns of a sudden into a drowning horror. Indeed, a close reading of Roman history does suggest, in blurriest outlines, some analogies with contemporary trends and conundrums. But there are perhaps more valuable insights to be parsed from our own little-known and, relatively speaking, recent history.
In West of the Revolution, Claudio Saunt, a noted scholar of early American and Native American history, spotlights nine places and formative events of 1776 that rarely raise a blip on the radar of even the most well-educated Americans. As Saunt writes in his introduction, “The American Revolution so dominates our understanding of the continent’s early history that only four digits—1776—are enough to evoke images of periwigs, quill pens, and yellowing copies of the Declaration of Independence.”
As of this year, the second Monday of the month is dedicated to my workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing.
While I increasingly rely on the Internet for reference—I’ll more likely type a word into my on-line dictionary or thesaurus than pull a wrist-breaker of an old tome off its shelf—there is still no substitute for a writer’s reference library: real books on a real shelf, at-hand. And among the most useful works in my own reference library is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style.
From the catalog copy:
“… Tufte presents—and comments on—more than a thousand excellent sentences chosen from the works of authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sentences come from an extensive search to identify some of the ways professional writers use the generous resources of the English language. “The book displays the sentences in fourteen chapters, each one organized around a syntactic concept—short sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases, appositives, parallelism, for example. It thus provides a systematic, comprehensive range of models for aspiring writers.”
But Artful Sentences is not only for aspiring writers. Having written more books than I’ll bother to count, I still find that an occasional review consistently yields inspirations.
Where, and for what effect, can I limber up my writing? Perhaps I need to work in shorter sentences. (p. 9) Bright little ones!
Or perhaps, I could play a bit with what Tufte terms “Catalogs of modifiers” (p.100)– basically, a bunch, a spew, an avalanche of adjectives.
Or perhaps, I might try “an adjective as an opener.” (p.160) Open doors, don’t they seem more inviting?
Artful Sentences elucidiates the immense range of possibilities we have in the English language to arrange our sentences, and within them, the sounds and rhythms of words, the better to sharpen and strengthen what we mean to say. And that, my dear writerly reader, is power.
Starting this year, every fourth Monday I run a Q & A with a fellow writer. This fourth Monday features Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, the author of Prodigal Children in the House of G-d: Stories (2018) and six books of poetry, including A Mouse Among Tottering Skyscrapers: Selected Yiddish Poems (2017). Preparing to Dance: New Yiddish Songs, a CD of nine of his Yiddish poems set to music by Michał Gorczyński, was released in 2014. Taub was honored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage as one of New York’s best emerging Jewish artists and has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and twice for a Best of the Net award. With Ellen Cassedy, he is the recipient of the 2012 Yiddish Book Center Translation Prize for Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel (2016). His short stories have appeared in such publications as Hamilton Stone Review, Jewish Fiction .net, The Jewish Literary Journal, Jewrotica, Penshaft: New Yiddish Writing, and Second Hand Stories Podcast.
C.M. MAYO: You are co-translator (with Ellen Cassedy) from the Yiddish of Blume Lempel’s extraordinary short stories, Oedipus in Brooklyn. Would you say that Lempel’s work has been an influence on your own fiction? Can you talk a bit about some of your influences, and your favorite writers?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Blume Lempel is certainly a source of personal inspiration, and working with Ellen Cassedy on that project was and continues to be a great joy. Despite suffering enormous familial loss in the Holocaust and years of creative block, Lempel built a career as a Yiddish writer with single-minded focus and commitment. She created an authorial voice that was uniquely her own and a prose rich in poetry, experimentation in time and voice, and empathy. She looked at characters at the margins of society and at themes still considered taboo, including abortion, prostitution, and incest. I was drawn to Lempel’s work for all of these reasons and in researching her autobiography, came to be inspired also by the example of her courage in life and art. Our work overlaps somewhat in our interest in life at the margins and blurring the line between poetry and prose, although I think much of Lempel’s work is more firmly anchored than mine in the realm of the experimental and avant-garde. I do see Lempel as a kindred literary spirit.
I have been reading voraciously and widely since childhood. It’s difficult to pinpoint specific literary influences. I prefer to think of texts whose effects remain with me. Even if I don’t recall particular plots, the authors’ themes and concerns, and overall sensibilities remain. I am interested in writers who take risks, who go against the grain, who can create a marriage of emotional impact and beauty of language, who write with psychological acuity and care.
A partial list of favorite English-language fictional texts, in alphabetical order of author’s last name, include:
Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Michelle Cliff, Abeng Marian Engel, Bear Janet Hobhouse, The Furies F.M. Mayor, The Rector’s Daughter Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant’s House: a Romance Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place Joyce Carol Oates, Where is Here? James Purdy, 69: Dream Palace and Other Stories Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, Home, and Lila Sinclair Ross, As For Me and My House Elizabeth Taylor, Angel and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
If we include non-fiction, poetry, and Yiddish literature and world literature in translation, there would be many more titles to add.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive writer and poet for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, Facebook, Twitter, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: The digital revolution has helped bring about a dynamic international literary culture. Poems and stories can now be read by anyone with computer access. Blogs such as yours also support the work of writers and connect writers and readers. Before appearing in book form, much of my work has appeared in online publications. In the digital age, it is more affordable to publish literary ‘zines, although maintaining the availability of defunct journals remains an issue of concern for literary publishers, writers, and readers. Facebook is useful for sending out announcements of new work and seeing what colleagues and friends have been doing. I also enjoy the travel, food, and family photos that people post! I started on Facebook fairly recently. I thought it would take more of my time that it actually has. I am not on Twitter or other social media.
There’s only a limited amount of time in the day. I like to set aside time for daily translation, reading, and/or writing or writing-related business, as well. The proliferation of media in the digital age offers tempting distractions from writing. There are now so many offerings in television and film, many of them quite literary and demanding extensive viewing time.
Still, I always return to the written word. And I prefer to read in hard copy. Nothing has replaced words on a paper—the joy that comes from concentration on those words, turning the page, the touch of paper, the heft of a book in one’s hand or one’s lap. The poems “Eavesdropping” and “Luddite’s Exhortation” in my fourth collection Prayers of a Heretic explore the pleasures—cerebral, sensual, and otherwise—of books and reading from books. The key to productivity is tuning out all of the distractions to draw on the creativity that emerges from focus and quiet, or perhaps more aptly put, quietude. One can be sitting in a noisy cafe and still be in a place of internal quiet.
But, of course, there are many ways to live and work as a writer. Find what works for you and honor that process.
C.M. MAYO: Are you in a writing group? If so, can you talk about the members, the process, and the value for you?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: When I lived in New York, I was in the Yugntruf Yiddish writers’ circle for many years. Attendees brought in a poem or a story and shared it with the group. It was a great way for me to get feedback on my Yiddish writing and to encounter new Yiddish creativity. That group continues to meet. I have attended two sessions of a poetry group here in Washington, D.C. I’m not sure if that qualifies as being “in a writing group.” Here too, folks distribute the poems, read it aloud, and then provide comments. The feedback was quite rigorous and helpful, and I enjoyed the gatherings. However, I’ve only attended two sessions since my recent focus has been on writing prose and on translating from the Yiddish.
C.M. MAYO: Did you experience any blocks while writing these stories, and if so, how did you break through them?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Fortunately, I did not experience writer’s block while writing these stories. As I note in the book, I wrote Prodigal Children in the House of G-d while on an artist’s residency at The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow (Eureka Springs, Arkansas). Having three weeks to concentrate solely on writing enabled my turn from poetry to fiction. TWCDH was a magical experience — a great studio, friendly staff and writers in residence, and the ideal setting that combined natural beauty and a charming, historical small town. During the afternoons, I took walks and worked through ideas for the writing I was doing in the studio. Sometimes, I took walks with other writers in residence.
C.M. MAYO: Back to a digital question At what point, if any, were you working on paper for these stories? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: My writing life as an adult has largely been conducted on the computer. Of course, the digital revolution has made it easier to submit work to literary magazines. Instead of having to print out hard copies, write and include a self-addressed stamped envelope, and go to the mailbox or post office, one can now submit work electronically. Writing on the computer also allows for extensive revision. In my childhood and youth, I wrote by hand. In college, I sometimes submitted papers typed on a typewriter. So I remember well the challenges in the revision process back then.
C.M. MAYO: Do you keep in active touch with your readers? If so, do you prefer hearing from them by email, sending a newsletter, a conversation via social media, some combination, or snail mail?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: I welcome feedback from readers. I prefer e-mail over other forms of communication. I sometimes go for long periods of time without checking Facebook. I rarely use snail mail. I try to answer all letters. Giving readings, particularly ones that include a Q & A, is another great way to connect with readers.
