BY C.M. MAYO — November 22, 2021 UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).
“[A]fter I started collecting typewriters in 1994, I rediscovered the pleasure of using them once in a while. My desire to use them more often led me to start “typecasting” in 2010—writing posts on a typewriter, then scanning and uploading them to a blog. It was a great decision. It connected me to the typosphere (typewriter bloggers around the world), and opened my eyes to the many uses these machines have today.”— Richard Polt
So, dear writerly readers, it is a delight and an honor to present you this month’s Q & A with none other than Richard Polt.
From The Typewriter Revolution’s catalog copy:
“Why a typewriter now? How do you find a good typewriter? How do you take care of it? The Typewriter Revolution has the answers.
“What do thousands of writers, makers, kids, poets, artists, steampunks, and hipsters have in common? They love typewriters—the magical, mechanical contraptions that are enjoying a surprising second life in the 21st century. The Typewriter Revolution documents the movement and provides practical advice on how to choose a typewriter, use it, and care for it—from National Novel Writing Month to letter-writing socials, from type-ins to customized typewriters.”
This is all a little more serious than it might appear, however. Richard Polt is a professor of Philosophy at Xavier University and the author of several works about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, most recently, Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties. Heidegger is perhaps best known for his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” which first appeared in print in 1954.
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Richard Polt, author of The Typewriter Revolution
C.M. MAYO: What prompted you to start using a typewriter?
RICHARD POLT: I took a typing class in school when I was 11 years old, in 1976, and my father soon found a 1937 Remington Noiseless no. 7 for me at a yard sale. I used that Remington for school, college, and grad school until I got a Mac in 1988. Then there was a period of several years when I didn’t even consider using a typewriter again. But after I started collecting typewriters in 1994, I rediscovered the pleasure of using them once in a while. My desire to use them more often led me to start “typecasting” in 2010—writing posts on a typewriter, then scanning and uploading them to a blog. It was a great decision. It connected me to the typosphere (typewriter bloggers around the world), and opened my eyes to the many uses these machines have today.
C.M. MAYO: What sorts of things do you use your typewriter to type?
RICHARD POLT: Brainstorms, fiction, poetry, letters, comments on students’ papers, blog posts.
C.M. MAYO: Which model is your go-to typewriter?
RICHARD POLT: I still love my first typewriter, the Remington Noiseless no. 7; it’s next to my laptop right now. I also really enjoy my Continental portable and my Olympia SG1. I enjoy cycling through other models as well, such as my Voss De Luxe, Torpedo 18, and Olivetti Lexikon 80.
C.M. MAYO: Which, in your opinion, is the number one slam-dunk most bodacious typewriter ever manufactured?
RICHARD POLT: I am always looking for “the perfect typewriter” and also simultaneously hoping I won’t find it, so that the exciting search can go on. But the Olympia SG1 comes close to perfect for a standard—it’s smooth and snappy, accurate, strong, and full of features. An interesting candidate for the perfect portable (though it’s still pretty big and heavy) is the Erika 20, a super-sophisticated East German machine that’s nearly impossible to find in QWERTY. And if you want an electric, the IBM Selectric can’t be beat.
C.M. MAYO: After your book, The Typewriter Revolution, was published, what surprised you the most about readers’ responses?
RICHARD POLT: The delightful response that I didn’t see coming was a dance based on my Typewriter Manifesto. The awful response that I didn’t see coming was a reader review that described the book as obscene (huh?).
RICHARD POLT: The idea began after I read a couple of short stories in the typosphere about the typewriter insurgency fighting the powers of computerdom, or people using typewriters in an apocalyptic scenario. I thought it would be fun to challenge people to write more stories along these lines—and to publish the typewritten texts. This project evolved into the anthologies Paradigm Shifts and Escapements, which I edited with novelist Frederic S. Durbin and English professor Andrew V. McFeaters. I didn’t think a mainstream publisher would be interested in this admittedly very specialized niche, so why not start my own publishing house?
Loose Dog Press (a pun on the name for a part in a typewriter’s escapement mechanism) is dedicated to promoting typewriting in the 21st century. The books are printed on demand, sold at cost, and available only on paper. There is more information at https://loosedogpress.blogspot.com.
C.M. MAYO: What gratified you, what frustrated you, and what surprised you about Loose Dog’s first books?
RICHARD POLT: We’ve been gratified and surprised by the amount of interest and the number of strong submissions that have come our way from around the planet. The Cold Hard Type series, which now includes four volumes, has successfully inspired people to take their typewriters down from the shelf and use their imagination both with them and about them. Honestly, although it’s been plenty of work to select contributions and use Photoshop to correct errors in typescripts, there have been almost no frustrations. My co-editors are insightful and friendly, and Linda M. Au has been a great help in producing the layout for each volume.
C.M. MAYO: If you could offer a word, or maybe a couple of sentences, of advice for anyone who is thinking of starting a press, what would you tell them?
RICHARD POLT: Do it! We are in a golden age of publishing, in the sense that you need no capital at all to begin publishing books. You just need some technical know-how to create a PDF which can then be printed on demand. Of course, it also helps to have literary and aesthetic taste. Appearances count.
C.M. MAYO: But back to typewriters: A thought experiment. Martin Heidegger, popping in from the afterlife, has offered to type his blurb for The Typewriter Revolution. What does he say?
RICHARD POLT: “What do you mean, type a blurb? I refuse to use a Schreibmaschine! The writing machine is destroying the essence of writing, which is hand-writing! … What’s that? You can’t read my handwriting? All right, I will have my assistant type it up. … OK, OK, I see the irony already. You don’t have to rub it in! Well, at least writing machines are not as devastating as thinking machines. So I’ll give Herr Polt’s scribbles some grudging credit for denouncing the cybernetic worldview.”
Writers take note! See also his call for submissions for the next Loose Dog Press anthology, Margin Releases: Typewritten Tales of Transgression. Deadline: March 1, 2022.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
BY C.M. MAYO — November 15, 2021 UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).
How wide is your Overton window? Some peoples’ seem to me to be pretty well squished. My writing assistant’s Mr. Duckie demonstrates the concept.
Of course your Overton window can be tooooo wide open. Watch out, pterodactyls might fly up your nose and chomp your brains.
From the Archives:
On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises
Transcript of Centennial Lecture University of Texas El Paso El Paso, Texas, October 7, 2015 BY C.M. MAYO
Thank you, Diana Natalicio, President of University of Texas El Paso, and everyone at here who made my visit and this lecture possible. And thank you very much to Roberto Coronado and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, El Paso Branch. And thank you all for making the effort to attend this evening. Special thanks to my much-admired creative writing colleague and old friend, Lex Williford.
My husband, who is Mexican, likes to joke that I missed being born Mexican by five miles. You might guess that means that I was born right here in El Paso—this “City of Surprises,” as writer and editor Marcia Hatfield Daudistel calls it. My dad was an artillery officer stationed at Fort Bliss—and I understand that he took some engineering classes here at UT El Paso. So it is a very special honor for me, as a native El Pasoan, to have been invited to speak to you today.
I can’t say it’s like coming home, because my parents are from Chicago and New York, and when I was still a baby, my dad decided on a career in business, and he took the family out to California—to the part of the San Francisco Bay Area now known as Silicon Valley. Culturally speaking, I’m a Californian.
But back to El Paso—to quote Marcia Hatfield Daudistel again— this “dark-eyed stranger abducted into Texas by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.”
For me, to be here in El Paso is like coming home in another, deeply meaningful sense. This is a border city. I am a border person. Where others might be… let’s say, a little nervous… we border people go back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico with ease, we are oftentimes bilingual, bicultural— or at least we don’t blink at some of the more exotic juxtapositions, whether culinary or musical, and the mixed up lingo. I too, have been known to speak my gringa-chilanga version Spanglish—or, I might throw clumps of español— para que me entiendes bien— into my English.
I don’t live on the border geographically, but culturally. I mean to say, when I got married 29 years ago, my husband and I moved to Mexico City—his home town, Chilangolandia—and now I have lived in Mexico City for more years than I have lived anywhere else, including California. And I should mention, I don’t live in Mexico as a typical expat, coccooned among my fellow Americans and Canadian snowbirds. I am enconsed in a Mexican family, living in a Mexican neighborhood, and I have many very dear Mexican friends and colleagues.
Long story short, over the last three decades of my life, although I remain a U.S. citizen, Mexico has become my world. This is why my books are all about Mexico.
I hope my books might be both beautiful and useful—I write them with as much courtesy for the reader as I can muster. But the truth is, the reason I write them is because I want to delve in and explore the complexity around me, and then, having gained a new level of understanding, tell the story my way. Living in Mexico, very quickly, I learned to distrust the easy assumptions and much of the narrative about Mexico spooned out for us, whether on this side of the border or the other, whether in tourist guides, newspapers, television, paperback novels, movies. And sometimes… even in textbooks.
In Mexico, it is often said that nothing is as it seems. If you halt the show and question— sincerely and energetically question— read the bibliography, and read beyond the bibliography; take the time to interview people, really listen, with both an open mind and an open-heart; go to places and stand there and look around for yourself; roll up your sleeves and dig into the archives… it has consistently been my experience that you will uncover secrets and surprises.
Of course, that could be said about the whole world, from Azerbaijan to Zambia. And El Paso, Texas, itself. But Mexico is what my books are about. I won’t stretch your patience to go on about all the books. I’m going to give you but three examples.
The title comes from a quote from John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez. “The very air here is miraculous and the outlines of reality change with the moment.”
There were a multitude of surprises for me in writing this book, but here is one:
What I had been told as a child in the California public school system, that the California missions, founded by the Spanish padres, began in San Diego, was not only not true—it obscured one of the greatest, strangest, and most tragic stories of the Americas, that of the indigenous peoples’ encounter with the Jesuit missionaries, whose first permanent California mission was hundreds of miles south of San Diego, on the Sea of Cortez at Loreto.
Loreto: Yes, that is an Italian name. The Jesuits named it after after an important basilica in Italy which enshrines a brick house— as the Church asserts, this is house of the Virgin Mary, brought from Nazareth during the Crusades by angels who flew it over the Adriatic Sea.
Loreto was founded in the late 17th century— roughly the same time that in the province of Texas, we see the first Spanish settlement at San Francisco de los Tejas.
When the Jesuits arrived in California, as they called this nearly 1,000 mile-long peninsula, they believed it was an island. Today we call it Baja or Lower California and unlike Upper California, lost to the United States after the US-Mexican War, it remains part of Mexico.
Spanish padres all? Hardly.
The Jesuit missionary who founded Loreto was Giovanni Salvaterra, an Italian from Milan, who, on arriving in New Spain, hispanicized his name to Juan María Salvatierra. One of his right-hand men, and a founder of other missions in California, was Father Francesco Piccolo, a Sicilian. Among the Jesuit padres in California, or as we say today, Baja California, there were a Frenchman, a Czech, a Scotsman, a Bavarian, a Bohemian. Many Germans.
In 1767, for reasons known only to himself, the Spanish king decided to expell the Jesuits from his realm. The newly appointed governor of California, Don Gaspar de Portolá—who would, eventually, head north with the Franciscans who would found the so-called California missions that I learned about in school— arrived in Loreto later that year.
And this is what happened—the part of the story—and it is only a part—as I told it from the Jesuits’ point of view:
From all over the peninsula the missionaries began to arrive at Loreto: from the South, Ignác Tirsch and Johann Bischoff; from Dolores, Lambert Hostell; from San Luis Gonzaga, Johann Jakob Baegert; José Juan Díez from La Purísima, Franz Inama von Sternegg from San José de Comondú, Miguel del Barco from San Javier. Francisco Escalante came from Santa Rosalía de Mulegé, José Rothea from San Ignacio, and Victoriano Arnés from Santa María Cabujakaamung, leaving still-green his first crops of wheat and cotton. At Mission Santa Gertrudis, Georg Retz had broken his leg and could neither walk nor ride; his neophytes carried him on a litter the nearly two hundred miles through the canyons of the Sierra de San Francisco, the Vizcaíno Desert, and the Sierra de Guadalupe. Wenceslaus Linck arrived last, because he was delayed tending to the dying in an epidemic at his Mission San Francisco de Borja. When the missionaries reached Loreto, Governor Portolá embraced each of them and, as was the Spanish custom, he kissed their hands.
Portolá had read the Order of Expulsion and taken possession of the Jesuits’ treasury and storehouse: a meager supply of gold and silver coins, a few bolts of cloth, tools for the soldiers and other gente de razón, and some dried meat and grain. No one was arrested.
The Jesuits were to sail on February 3, 1768. Their ship, the poor two-masted Concepción, waited at anchor in the harbor. They would cross the Sea of Cortés, then travel overland to Veracruz; from there, they would be sent to exile with their fellow Jesuits in the Papal States and Germany.
Against the king’s explicit orders, Governor Portolá permitted the missionaries a final High Mass. Father Retz celebrated before the Virgin of Loreto, which was draped for the occasion with a black shroud. Father Ducrue gave the sermon. After supper, the missionaries returned to the church, to pray for California and ask God’s mercy and assistance. And then, as they walked towards the shore, wrote Father Ducrue,
“behold we were surrounded on all sides by the people, the Spanish soldiers among them. Some knelt on the sand to kiss our hands and feet, others knelt with arms outstretched in the form of a cross and publicly pleading for pardon. Others tenderly embraced the missionaries, bidding them farewell and wishing them a happy voyage through loud weeping and sobbing.”
The Indians carried the priests on their shoulders through the surf to the launch. There the priests recited the Litanies of the Virgin of Loreto, their voices carrying over the darkness of the water.
“We were sixteen Jesuits in all,” wrote Father Baegert. “Exactly the same number, that is, sixteen Jesuits, one brother and fifteen priests, we left behind, buried in California.”
The Jesuits had been on the peninsula for nearly seventy-one years.
Though fiction, this book is based on several years of original archival research. What empire? What prince?
Well, it turns out that Mexico’s first emperor, the Emperor Iturbide, had a grandson. Those of you know know your Mexican history will recall that the Emperor Iturbide was the final leader of Mexico’s Independence from Spain, he was crowned Emperor of Mexico in 1822, he abdicated in 1823, and alas, he was executed in 1824. The Emperor Iturbide had two grandsons, actually, but I’m going to simplify and just talk about the one who was a two year old child in Mexico City when the second emperor—Maximilian von Habsburg—whose arrival in Mexico had been made possible by the armies of Louis Napoleon—made a secret contract with the Iturbide family to bring this child into his Casa Imperial. It’s wasn’t an adoption, exactly, but kind of sort of—there’s more to say about that, but the bottom line is—and here is the surprise: in 1865-1866, the “high noon” of Mexico’s Second Empire, the heir presumptive to the throne of Mexico was a two year old half-American.
And then came a tremendous drama, for his heart-broken mother tried to reclaim her child. The Emperor Maximilian arrested her and expelled her from Mexico—and she went straight to Paris, to her ambassador there, and got up such a scandal that the story made the front page of the New York Times: about “the kidnapping of an American child” by the “so-called Emperor of Mexico.”
This was the same time that the U.S. government was supporting Benito Juárez and his Republicans in their struggle to overthrow Maximilian and expel the French. Benito Juárez, as in Ciudad Juárez.
As I wrote elsewhere:
When The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire came out in 2009 and in Spanish in 2010, two reactions surprised me. First, that many readers, especially younger ones, were disturbed by the photograph, a formal carte-de-visite, of the little prince. Agustín de Iturbide y Green was a beautiful child, with a cupid’s mouth, and he looked more like, say, an English prince than a typical Mexican. Those readers would make a twisted face, asking, “Why is he in a girl’s dress?” (Well, folks, that’s how they dressed aristocratic little boys back then.)
Second, that so many marveled at my having spun a novel out of “a little footnote.” Except for misinterpreted snippets, the story of Agustín de Iturbide y Green in the court of Maximilian may have been forgotten in the archives until I dug it out, but it was no mere footnote. In a monarchy, the heir presumptive, though he be in a dress and diapers, is the living guarantee of the regime’s future, and more: he is the living symbol of his future people—his subjects.
Would Mexicans be subjects, creatures born to obey—or citizens, men and women who with their full rights participate in creating their own polity? This had been Mexico’s bitter and bloody question for the whole of the nineteenth century.
In telling the prince’s story, from the high-noon of the Second Empire in 1865 to its collapse, and his return to his parents in Washington in 1867, I was telling the story of the fall of Mexican monarchism, a powerful idea up until that time, which asserted the mystical embodiment of all Mexicans in the person of a hereditary sovereign.
To be honest, in sorting out Mexico’s most convoluted and transnational episode, it took me more time than I would like to admit to boil my aim down to so few words. And so, in fairness, I should not have been surprised by the reaction of those readers, for whom (as it was for me) monarchism is just a quaintly ridiculous thing preserved in the formaldehyde of textbooks or the syrup of entertainment, and where still living, as in Spain and the U.K., its royal families harmless fodder for the sorts of magazines one reads at the hairdressers.
But back to the last prince, Agustín de Iturbide y Green.
The child’s father, the second son of the Emperor Iturbide, was a Mexican diplomat, and his mother, née Alice Green, was a Washington belle, descended from the Platers—a very prominent Tidewater Maryland family—and she was a granddaughter of General Uriah Forrest, who had been an aide to General George Washington in the American Revolution.
So if you can believe it, I was able to find items of interest about the last prince of the Mexican empire in the libraries of the Society of the Cinncinati and the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington DC.
And much more in Washington DC: Agustín de Iturbide y Green’s personal papers are at Catholic University; there is also a small archive at Georgetown University; and many documents, including the record of his parents’ marriage and much about the family estate at Rosedale, in Washington DC, is in the Historical Society of Washington DC.
Most crucially, the archive of the Emperor Iturbide and the archive of the Iturbide Family are not in Mexico but in the Library of Congress.
Yes, there certainly are archives of interest in Mexico and in Texas and New York and Vienna and elsewhere, but the most pertinent ones for the story of Agustín de Iturbide y Green are in Washington DC. Why Washington DC?
Upon the execution of the Emperor Iturbide in 1824 his widow and children had fled to Washington DC, under the protection of the Jesuits in Georgetown, where they had their college overlooking the Potomac. Flash foward to the early 20th century: Agustín de Iturbide y Green was living in Washington DC, teaching Spanish and French at Georgetown, when he sold the Emperor Iturbide and Iturbide Family papers to the Library of Congress. I’m sure he needed the space and the money, but given the turmoil in Mexico at the time, this was probably the wisest decision he could have made to preserve the papers. And I for one am immensely grateful that he did.
Ah, archives, they are full to the brim with secrets and surprises. Which leads me to my latest book, which was prompted by a visit to an archive in Mexico City’s National Palace where I found… a secret book. And on a whim, because I am a translator, I offered to translate it. And it was such a strange little book that I then felt compelled to write a book about that book.
Well, here we are at the US-Mexico border, so I am sure that most of you know perfectly well who Francisco I. Madero was— after all, he prepared for the famous Battle of Juárez from here in El Paso. And in the thick of that 1910 Revolution he came over here to El Paso to have dinner a few times, as well, as I recall. But if you’re rusty on your Mexican history, these are the barebones basics:
Francisco I. Madero was the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, and President of Mexico from 1911 to 1913, when he was overthrown in a coup d’etat and, with shocking casualness, executed. The Mexican Revolution then exploded into a new and more violent phase, churning on until 1920 with Alvaro Obregón’s presidency or, as some historians argue, the end of the Cristero Rebellion in 1929.
Here is a little bit more about Madero from my book, to quote:
Popular imagery of the Mexican Revolution usually features rustic characters in bandoliers and washtub-sized sombreros, such as smoldering-eyed Emiliano Zapata, with his handlebar mustache and skin-tight trousers, or Pancho Villa, who always seems to wear the smirk of having just quaffed a beer (though he was a teetotaler; more likely it was a strawberry soda).
Less often are we shown Don Francisco, handsomely-dressed scion of one of Mexico’s wealthiest families—usually bareheaded, occasionally in a top hat—for he was and remains a confounding figure. He was a Spiritist, and what the devil is that? I had no idea. And until 2008, it had not occurred to me to wonder.
2008 was when I first encountered his Spiritist Manual. Any student of the Mexican Revolution learns about Madero’s first book, La sucesión presidencial en 1910, or The Presidential Succession in 1910, which was published in 1909. This spelled out Madero’s political platform, and it worked like a magnet to bring together his political party and the nation-wide support for his candidacy and presential campaigns.
Less known is that in 1911, when Madero was president-elect, under another name—Bhima, after a warrior in the Hindu sacred text known as the Bhagavad Gita— he published his Manual espírita or Spiritist Manual.
Madero was in fact not only an ardent Spiritist but a Spiritist medium who left a substantial archive of his mediumnistic notebooks. In other words, Madero practised what is called automatic writing, or channeling written messages from what he believed were disembodied consciousnesses. These spirits urged him to write La sucesión presidencial en México—and to write the Manual espírita.
What exactly is Spiritism? In essense, to quote from my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, it is the belief that:
We are not our physical bodies; we are spirits, and as such we are immortal and we are destined, lifetime by lifetime, not by any ritual intermediated by clerics, but by freely chosen good works, to evolve into ever higher levels of consciousness and so return to God.
To quote Madero himself in my translation of his book, Spiritist Manual:
Spiritism is the science concerned with investigating the powers of the human spirit, its past before ariving in this world, and its fortune on abandoning it.
I hasten to mention, I am not the first to write about Madero’s Spiritism.
Enrique Krauze, probably Mexico’s best-known historian, publishedFrancisco I. Madero, místico de la libertad, which introduced the topic to a broad public, back in the late 1980s.
Yolia Tortolero, who wrote her deeply researched thesis at El Colegio de México under the highly regarded historian of the Revolution, Javier Garciadiego, published that as El espiritismo seduce a Francisco I. Madero. Dr. Tortolero’s is a both vital and superb work— and by the way, you can now download that in Kindle.
Others to mention are Mexican historians Manuel Guerra de Luna and Alejandro Rosas Robles, and the novelist Ignacio Solares who wrote the now classic novel Madero, el otro.
That said, few of the histories of the Revolution give Madero’s Spiritism more than a passing— toe-curlingly brief!— mention. His main biographer, Stanley Ross, relegates the Spiritist Manual to a footnote! And one otherwise excellent university press textbook on Mexico says that Madero was an atheist—which is rather like calling the Pope Protestant.
My contribution was to have translated the Spiritist Manual and to have given Madero’s metaphysics more of an historical and North American context in a narrative that you might call “creative nonfiction”—in other words, it’s not a novel, but I hope it reads like one.
I also had the prividege of being able to go through Madero’s personal library which is the Centro de Estudios de Historia de México in Mexico City—walking distance from my house, happily for me, because I had to visit multiple times to get through what is, very probably, one of the most important collections of esoteric literature in the Americas. Many, many secrets and surprises in there… Books on reincarnation, Williams James’ favorite medium, Madame Piper, books by Madam Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Papus, Swami Vivekenanda, Dr. Peebles, Dr. Krumm-Heller, aka Maestro Huiracocha. … But I am racing the clock.
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To conclude. The Jesuit missions in California, a half-American heir presumptive to the throne of Mexico, a revolutionary hero and president who was a Spiritist medium: each is a story that has interests who would prefer that it not be told.
As for the Jesuit missions of California, my guess is that those setting the teaching agenda for the California public school system of my time—this would have been in the early 1970s—felt constrained by the available number of teaching hours and the state border, and if a major limb of the story didn’t fit in their box, well, whack! Amputate as needed.
As noted, until I drew it out, the story of the little prince, Agustin de Iturbide y Green, was languishing in archives outside Mexico and, in the days before the Internet, these were very time-consuming to track down and consult. Furthermore, until relatively recently, say, the past two decades, in Mexican academic circles, Mexican monarchism has been a hot potato of a subject—better not to touch. And in some ways it still is a hot potato of a subject.
Another complicating factor, perhaps the most important, however, was that for the Mexican monarchists, the Emperor Maximilian’s entanglement with the Iturbide family was embarrassing. It underscored the fact that after eight years of marriage Maximilian and his wife Carlota had been unable to produce an heir. And, alas, Maximilian and Carlota’s treatment of the child’s very young and heartbroken mother was hamfistedly cruel. Many things about the arrangement with the Iturbides were mystifying even to those close to the imperial couple, and especially for those unfamiliar, as most Mexicans were, with the rarified traditions of the House of the Habsburgs and of other European royal families.
On their journey from Europe to Mexico in 1864, Maximilian and Carlota wrote a book of court protocol, Reglamento y ceremonial de la corte, which was published in 1865. Almost unknown is the fact that in 1866, a second edition was published with an all-new first chapter on The Iturbide Princes. It explained that the Iturbide princes were not imperial princes—for they were not children of the sovereigns. However, they had the status of the Murat princes.
The Murat princes! Then, as now, for most they would be, shall we say, pretty obscure. The Murat princes were descendants of the King of Naples, Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law. So the Murat princes were descendants of a sovereign and cousins to Louis Napoleon and so considered part of his Imperial Household.
So we see that the eyewitness memoirs that were sympathetic to Maximilian are all strangely vague on the Iturbides or, as in the case of José Luis Blasio’s Maximiliano íntimo, serve up slanderous stories about the Iturbides that are flatly contradicted by official birth, marriage and death certificates.
But as an aside, I must mention that one of the biggest surprises for me was to have encountered José Luis Blasio’s Maximiliano íntimo. Yes, I have my quibbles with it, and it is politically very incorrect: Blasio was Maximilian’s loyal and admiring secretary. But it so sparkles with heart and with life that I would put Maximiliano íntimo on par with Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain as one of the greatest literary treasures of Mexico. And for the period—Mexico’s Second Empire or “French Intervention”— Maximiliano íntimo is a gem beyond compare.
Finally, Francisco I. Madero. For not all, certainly, but for many Mexicans, and indeed many members of Mexico’s intellectual and political elite, Francisco I. Madero, Mexico’s “Apostle of Democracy” as a Spiritist medium is a disturbing image. They regard the idea of communicating with spirits as a species of supersition, or pura locura, craziness, beneath the dignity of serious consideration. Moreover, if you didn’t know already, I am sure you guessed, the Catholic Church prohibits Spiritism and its main ritual, the séance.
The poet Alan Ginsburg, perhaps channeling Gertrude Stein, said, “Notice what you notice.” As I understand it: that means, remove the filters—the filters other people want you to wear to distort your clear vision.
Notice. Notice what you notice! Next step: really look. And look again. Keep looking. Delve in. Whether your concern is Mexico, or the border, or El Paso, or the world itself, all manner of secrets and surprises await you.
THANK YOU.
PS The transcript of this lecture is also available in German on my German-language website, www.cmmayoschriftstellerin.com
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I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
Blah verbszzzzzzz. My writing assistant models the concept.
He was tall. He was old. He went to have a nap. Was, was, went. This reader’s asnooze already!
Some examples of livelier verbs:
Some rough-and-tumble cowboy movie would scramble across the screen –Bill Cunningham, Fashion Climbing
I ebbed down into the darkness of sleep – Jack London, The Star Rover
In fact, I bought some Ziploc Space Bags (in tropical colours), which are vacuum-resealable bags capable of squishing a huge pile of clothing into one fruity brick. –Melanie Kobayashi, Bag and a Beret, February 17, 2014, Why Do Laundry When You Have Scissors?
Ooh, squish, that’s just squishalicious!
She didn’t believe in the war, but it wasn’t the soldiers’ fault that they’d been gulped down by it. – Alice Miller, More Miracle Than Bird
How to come up with livelier verbs? Yea verily, even in the murk of the Present Rhinocerosness, it can be done. If you wish upon the gibbous moon, or a fluff of dandelion, one or eleven may just pop into your coconut! On a more practical level, I can recommend reading whatever you happen to be reading closely, and when you come upon any verb that strikes you as especially vivid and apt, jot it down. You thereby train yourself to become more alert to them. And there’s no law against making use of them yourself.
Just a few of the verbs on my own notecards:
flout blabber brandish get jazzed baffle delude jettison canvass pander abide degrade scourge fluff fling ping ring zing
BY C.M. MAYO — November 1, 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.
The edge of the Permian Basin at the Guadalupe Mountains, as seen from the window of a jet. Photo: C.M. Mayo.
The Butterfield Overland Mail by Waterman L. Ormsby (Only Through Passenger on the First Westbound Stage) Edited by Lyle H. Wright and Josephne M. Bynum. Shown: My copy of the seventh printing (1972) of the handsome edition published by the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery in 1942.
With time and patience and, presumably, approved government-issued identification and a credit card, you can easily drive or fly across Far West Texas. But just look out the window at this rough, bone-dry country and you’ll know, your path across it would be nigh impossible without fossil fuels.
For many thousands of years, as archaeological evidence attests, people came into its spring-laced mountains, and also camped in its ciénegas (oases), such as Hueco Tanks, for seasonal hunting and fishing, and processing that meat, and seeds, berries, and roots. When out hunting or moving on, they would follow the big river we call the Rio Grande or a creek, such as Toyah or Alamito— or if not, they would would have known, whether by direct knowledge or tradition, how far they would have had to walk until the next source of water, and how to find it. To extend their range, they wore sandals woven of lechugilla, and used gourds and baskets to carry food and water. In hot weather they would have walked by moonlight. But no one in their right mind would have set out walking for hundreds of miles over the open desert, on so straight and water-scarce a path as our asphalted highways.
The transportation technologies that harnessed the horse, mule, burro and donkey arrived in the Americas with the European colonists in the 16th century. For this form of transportation, fuel is forage. And you need water. You either have enough forage and water, and at regular intervals, or the animals collapse and die. You also need to give them a chance to rest.
Flash forward to 1858. The American Southwest, including gold-rich California, is the prize of the US-Mexican War, which had concluded a decade earlier. Texas, having revolted and won its independence from Mexico in 1836, had become the 28th state of the Union in 1845. The unfathomably vast deposits of petroleum and natural gas lie deep within in its Permian Basin, a complex of geologic structures and sub-basins named after the Permian Period of 299 to 251 million years ago. Part of the Permian Basin extends into Far West Texas, that is, Texas west of the Pecos River, the subject of my book in-progress. But in 1858 no one imagined that fabulous abundance of “black gold,” nor could they have dreamed of the material and, consequently, political power it would allow the United States to command over the world over so much of the twentieth century. The Permian Basin wasn’t even a concept in 1858. No one then saw anything much of value in Far West Texas, except some salt. As for the Pecos, as one old-timer told historian Patrick Dearen, it was so brackish “a snake wouldn’t drink it.”
Texas west of the Pecos was a brutal inconvenience to be crossed, as quickly and cheaply as possible, either on the way to, or the way back from California. In addition to the lack of water, there was the ever-present danger of attacks by bandits, and by Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowa. Fossil-fuel-powered transport—the railroad— was coming to Far West Texas, but the track would not be hammered into place until many years after the US Civil War, which outbreak lay three more years over the horizon. In 1858, for these parts, the cutting-edge transportation technology was the stagecoach: a wheeled box for mail and passengers, hauled over dirt roads by a team of mules or horses. The idea was, at the scheduled stops on its route, passengers could get on and off, have a rest and a bite to eat, the mailbags could be unloaded and loaded, and the animals refreshed.
In 1857, an act of Congress had authorized a mail and passenger stage line to connect St Louis / Memphis and San Francisco. The Postmaster General selected the route that swi=ung down into Far West Texas (among the many considered), and awarded the contract for the semi-weekly service to John Butterfield and associates. At 2,700 miles long, Butterfield’s Overland Mail would be not only the longest stagecoach line in the world, but a chapter, albeit brief—it ended with the outbreak of the Civil War— of signal importance in the economic development and cohesion of the United States.
The first through-passenger on the west-bound stage was Waterman L. Ormsby, a 23 year-old New Yorker, whose eight reports appeared in the New York Herald.
My pencil points to the Pinery, the stagecoach stop at the foot of the Guadalupe Mountains in Far West Texas.
The map from the book (above), shows the stagecoach stops for the Butterfield Overland Mail Route, from St. Louis (at the far top right, east) to San Francisco (far top left, west). That map is difficult to make out, I’ll grant. The map below is a close-up of Trans-Pecos Texas, from the same map. The Butterfield Overland arrived at the Pecos River at Horsehead Crossing, then traveled up alongside its the steep banks to Emigrant Crossing, and then on up the Pecos to Pope’s Camp. Then, heading west, the stage stopped at Delaware Springs; the Pinery, in the shadow of Guadalupe Peak (now the Guadalupe Mountains National Park); Cornudas by the salt beds; the oasis of Hueco Tanks; and finally, the tiny settlement of Franklin, now known as the city of El Paso—before heading to parts further west.
Overland Mail Company schedule, as of Spetmber 16, 1858, reprinted in The Butterfield Overland Mail by Waterman L. Ormsby.
The schedule shows that the stagecoach departed the Pecos River (Emigrant’s Crossing) on Thursdays and Sundays at 3:45 AM, averaging 4 1/2 miles an hour, to arrive at El Paso Saturdays and Tuesdays. The footnote reads, in part: “If they are behind this time, it will be necessary to urge the animals on to the highest speed that they can be driven without injury.”
The pressure to profit in the capitalist race against the clock comes through vividly in Ormsby’s reports. From his report near El Paso, Texas, September 28, 1858:
“We travel night and day, and only stop long enough to change teams and eat. The stations are not all yet finished, and there are some very long drives—varying from thirty-five to seventy-five miles—without an opportunity of procuring fresh teams.”
Ormsby’s report for the New York Herald of October 10, 1858, from San Francisco, is the one that details the crossing of Far West Texas. He begins:
“Safe and sound from all the threatened dangers of Indians, tropic suns, rattlesnakes, mustang horses, jerked beef, terrific mountain passes, fording rivers, and all the concomitants which envy, pedantry, and ignorance had predicted for all passengers by the overland mail route over which I have just passed, here I am in San Francisco, having made the passage from the St. Louis post office to the San Francisco post office in twenty-three days, twenty-three hours and a half, just one day and a half an hour less than the time required by the Overland Mail Company’s contract with the Post Office Department.”
(It is only the fact that he was a 23 year old New Yorker that inclines me to believe him, a little, when he claims, “I feel almost fresh enough to undertake it again.”)
Arriving at the Pecos River, which had “no trees or any unusual luxuriance of foliage on the banks,” the driver who takes charge of the stagecoach is:
“Captain Skillman, an old frontier man who was the first to run the San Antonio and Santa Fé mail at a time when a fight with the Indians, every trip, was considered in the contract. He is a man about forty-five years of age, in appearance much resembling the portraits of the Wandering Jew, with the exception that he carries several revolvers and bowie knives, dresses in buckskin, and has a sandy head of hair and beard. He loved hard work and adventures, and hates ‘injuns,’ and knows the country here pretty well.” (p.68)
But it wasn’t all Kumbaya and PETA for the mules:
“We started with four mules to the wagon and eighteen in the cavellado; but the latter dwindled down in number as one by one the animals gave out.” (p.69)
The stagecoach jolted up alongside the north shore of the Pecos for sixteen miles, then:
“met a train of wagons belonging to Mr. McHenry, who was going from San Francisco to San Antonio, carrying a load of grain for the company on the way. By his invitation, we stopped and breakfasted with him, giving our mules a chance to eat, drink and rest—all of which they much needed.”
Miles later, after Emigrant Crossing, and another slogging day:
“We continued our weary and dusty road up the Pecos…inhaling constant clouds of dust and jolting along almost at snail’s pace. Our animals kept giving out so that we had to leave them on the road; and by the time we reached Pope’s Camp at least half a dozen had been disposed of in this way. ” (p.71)
But, O, Nature!
“As we neared Pope’s Camp, in the bright moonlight, we could see the Guadalupe Mountains, sixty miles distant on the other side of the river, stranding out in bold relief against the clear sky, like the walls of some ancient fortress covered with towers and embattlements. I am told that on a clear day this peak has been seen across the plains for the distance of over one hundred miles, so tall is it and so low the country about it.” (p.71)
At Pope’s Camp, they got their fresh team—and “some supper of shortcake, coffee, dried beef and raw onions” (p.72) that beef being cooked over a fire of buffalo chips (yes, that is what you think it is).
Ormsby continues:
“The Guadalupe Peak loomed up before us all day in the most aggravating manner. It fairly seemed to be further off the more we traveled, so that I almost gave up in despair all hopes of reaching it. Our last eight or ten miles were among the foothills of the range, and I now confidently believed we were within a mile or two, at the outside. But the road wound and crooked over the interminable hills for miles yet and we seemed to be no nearer than before. I could see the outlines of the mountain plainly, and as I eagerly asked how far it was, the captain laughingly told me it was just five miles yet, and we had better stop to give the animals a little rest or they could never finish it. ” (p.73)
So stop they did, by the cool, bubbling water of Independence Spring. Then:
“We were obliged to actually beat our mules with rocks to make them go the remaining five miles to the station” (p.73)
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For a complete and splendidly illustrated history of the Overland Mail, nothing to date beats Glen Sample Ely’s The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail 1858-1861 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). I am fortunate to have a copy of this magnificent tome in my working library.
About those stagecoaches and their teams, writes Ely:
“The stagecoaches used by the Overland Mail Company in West Texas were not the heavy wooden Concord coaches seen in such popular Western movies as Stagecoach. Along the arid frontier, it was too taxing on livestock to pull a cumbersome Concord through deep sand roads in dry weather or through boggy stretches after heavy rains and flooding. In Texas, the typical passenger vehicle was the lighter, canvas-topped Celerity wagon, also known as a mud wagon.” (p.15)
As for the mules:
“Much of the time, four-mule teams were hitched to Butterfield’s mud wagons, although horses were used on some sections of the route. The livestock varied in cost: the lead mules at the front of the team ran $35 to $40 each, whereas higher-grade mules (known as “wheelers”) costing $70 to $80 each were used at the back of the team, closer to the coach. The Overland Mail Company kept ten to twenty mules on hand at each station. Butterfield’s larger regional depots kept fifty to sixty animals in reserve for needed adjustments along the line.” (pp.15-16)
To keep them in feed was a challenge:
The Overland Mail Company kept a large supply of corn and hay on hand for the livestock, as the local terrain was usually too sparse to support a station’s requirements year-round. Local grasses were most prevalent from spring to early fall, during the so-called rainy season. Leaving the stage stop to go out and cut hay was often a deadly task. Raiding Comanches and Apaches targeted employees out on forage detail.” (p.17)
It was reported that, even for 50 dollars an hour—a stupendous sum at the time—there were occasions when no man would cut hay. Speaking of which, on next month’s first Monday I’ll be showcasing some of the captivity memoirs in my working library.
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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.
C.M. MAYO: 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, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
Down with social media!
LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ: “I avoid social media as much as possible—I think it is destroying critical thinking, as well as print journalism. A lot of it is simply garbage. I do like email, though I miss getting personal letters in the mail.” —From Q & A with Lynne Sharon Schwartz About Crossing Borders, Madam Mayo blog, August 23, 2021
MATTHEW PENNOCK: “I am not particularly prolific. I do not write every day, and I’m often distracted by all the shows I can stream, and podcasts I can listen to. Social media has never really appealed to me, so I am okay there, but other than that, someone needs to give me some tips about how to get a little more done.” —From Q & A with Poet Matthew Pennock on The Miracle Machine Madam Mayo blog, November 23, 2020
ALVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: “While I am writing, I minimize interruptions, including turning off my cellphone and notifications. I only turn it back on when I am having a break. In general, I try to use social media as little as possible. What I do is to log in, scroll down a few posts, and, if I have to post something, I do it and then log off. The truth is that, when we are on social media, we easily loose ownership of our time, which we put for free at the disposal of these companies. We become their workers. I prefer to use my time for other things.” —From Q & A with Álvaro Santana-Acuña on Writing Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic, Madam Mayo blog, December 28, 2020
It depends…
CHRISTINA THOMPSON: “I think this depends on what stage one is at in the writing process. When you’re actually writing a book, all this stuff is a distraction and you have to be very careful not to waste too much time on it. But once your book is published, it becomes a lifeline to your readership, and the more you participate the better. So, I think it’s really a matter of making all these opportunities work for and not against you, and that takes a certain amount of discipline.” —From Q & A with Christina Thompson on Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, Madam Mayo blog, January 25, 2021
Balance
JAN CLEERE: “While digital sources have made a writer’s job more efficient when it comes to finding pertinent sources, it has also taken away that spontaneous delight of uncovering a long lost letter or hidden journal that has not yet been digitized. I try to focus on the business of writing separate from the hours I spend actually writing. Not always possible but I have found by trying to compartmentalize the creative from the business end of writing, I am more productive. The trick is to balance these activities so that by the end of the day, you feel you have put out all the fires as well as progressed with your writing.” —From Q & A with Jan Cleere on Military Wives in Arizona Territory: A History of Women Who Shaped the Frontier, March 22, 2021
No problemo!
SOLVEIG EGGERZ: “Actually I love writing on the computer. I am not one to long for life in a cabin on a mountaintop where I write on a yellow pad free of technology. I don’t like to be surprised by “emergencies” days after they occur. I resolve the issue of disturbances by keeping my phone next to me, so I can glance at a message without shutting down my story. Maybe I am exaggerating my equanimity!” —From Q & A with Solveig Eggerz on Sigga of Reykjavik, February 22, 2021
KARREN ALENIER: “I’m used to being interrupted. I grew up in house of six children. I was eldest. The point is when I am working, I am able to ignore the lure of online wonders like YouTube, blogs and newspapers. However, I like to work in silence and know that listening to radio, TV, or music is too distracting. Yes, my smart phone is an interrupter. Still I don’t turn that off because someone important to me might reach out and need me. Some of my friends get annoyed that I don’t read their Facebook pages except occasionally. The best way for me to get something done is to put it on my list of things to do. I take great pleasure in ticking off those items.” —From Q & A with Karren Alenier on her New Book How We Hold On, the Word Works, Paul Bowles & More, Madam Mayo blog, September 27, 2021
DAVID O. STEWART: “For a lot of years, I was a trial and appellate lawyer with a dozen or more active cases at a time. I used to describe my work as a life of interruptions. Clients called. Colleagues dropped by (remember offices?). Opposing lawyers called. Dumb firm meetings. Interviewing job applicants. I was constantly dropping one subject to pick up another. I tried to be in my office by seven a.m. to get some uninterrupted time. So these days, working at home by myself, I actually get antsy if I don’t have a few interruptions. I’m used to working for a stretch, taking a few minutes off to do something stupid (see social media) or annoying (see call health insurer), and then getting back to work. It’s normal.” —From Q & A with Biographer David O. Stewart on the Stunning Fact of George Washington, Madam Mayo blog, June 28, 2021
Go into another world…
SUSAN J. TWEIT: “When I am writing, I am in another world. I turn off notifications on my phone and computer, so that I’m not distracted by the bing of email coming in or the ding of texts or news alerts. My daily routine is pretty simple: I post a haiku and photo on social media every morning (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), and answer any comments on my posts. After half an hour on social media—I set a timer—I read the news online. When I’ve finished with the news—which is research time for me, as news stories, especially those about science, are raw material for my writing—I write until the well runs dry. And then, usually at two or three in the afternoon, I allow myself to go back to social media, answer other comments, check the news. Then I close my laptop and go outside into the real world and walk for a mile or two on the trails around my neighborhood to clear my head. Getting outside into the “near-wild” of the greenbelt trails in my high-desert neighborhood keeps me sane in turbulent times, and refills my creative well. Nature is my medicine, inspiration, and my solace.” —From Q & A with Susan J. Tweit on Her Memoir, Bless the Birds: Living with Love in a Time of Dying, April 26, 2021
KATHLEEN ALCALA: “All of this is terrible. I am so easily distracted. I will start laundry, open a file, take notes by hand, and forget what I had planned to do that day. For me, the best strategy is still the writing residency, away from home, where I don’t have any excuses and fewer distractions. This is especially needed when I am trying to organize large blocks of writing, such as the chapters in a novel.” —From Q & A with Kathleen Alcalá on Spirits of the Ordinary, Madam Mayo blog, May 24, 2021
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My Own Logbook and Stopwatch for Work on Madam Mayo Blog
The ever-increasing and OMG-so-many siren calls to the Internet—as a writer, it’s something I’ve been struggling with and pondering on for the past many years. I’ve had some continuing frustrations, but also some successes, and I’ve blogged about the latter (see my writing workshop archive). Tips & Tricks for Coping with Digital Distractions, that’s a book I’m not going to write because I’m already writing another book, with two others contemplated after that, in addition to hosting this blog. Enough already!
But I will offer a word on my strategy for fitting Madam Mayo blog into my week. This blog has been ongoing since 2006, and since 2019, on a regular schedule of posting on Mondays. Although for years I resisted establishing a regular schedule, to my surprise, it has made the blog far easier to manage.
One of the biggest challenges to the sort of blogging I do is that because there’s no editor, no paying subscribers, it’s easy to have the whole show just ooze on out into who-knows-what-who-knows-when.
If you enjoy writing, watch out, blogging can take over your writing life!
Blogging then, for me, is what behavior modification expert B.J. Fogg, in his book Tiny Habits, terms a “downhill habit,” that is, a habit “that is easy to maintain but difficult to stop.” (Of course, on the other hand, for many people, blogging is, as per B.J. Fogg, an “uphill habit,” that is, one that requires ongoing attention to maintain but is easy to stop.)
Starting in January of 2021, I have been attending to the tiny habit of logging the time I spend on Madam Mayo blog, aiming for about two hours per week, never more than an hour a day, and also aiming for putting my attention on it (including dispatching any related emails) only on Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays. When I sit down to work on Madam Mayo blog, I open a digital stopwatch app. When I’m done, I note the date and time spent in the logbook. Was it as scheduled, and within the time limit? If so, I give the entry a check mark and do the B.J. Fogg prescribed “celebration.” Yes, it’s kind of nerdy, but I have been finding this system, or rather, set of tiny habits, balancing, energizing, efficient and, hey, just fun.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
BY C.M. MAYO — October 18, 2021 UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).
Yea verily, even in the doldrums of the present rhinocerosness, the American literary short story lives on. I must thank Richard Polt, author of The Typewriter Revolution, for the prompt that inspired me to write my latest typewriter short story, “Julius Knows,” which, I am honored to report, appears in the gorgeous new Fall 2021 issue of Catamaran.
I’ll post “Julius Knows” here on the blog, as soon as I get around to typing it up on my Hermes 3000. Meanwhile, you can read my previous typewritten short story about a typewriter, “What Happened to the Dog,” which originally appeared in the anthology edited by Richard Polt, et al., Escapements: Typewritten Tales from Post-Digital Worlds.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
Be bold! Some wacky guys demonstrate the concept by taking an itty bitty step… off the top of a mountain.
Boldly nurture your creativity! Heed the call to your greatness, your highest self, ever and always! Even if you feel itty bitty! Because you know that first draft is crap! Herewith, a set of tips and tricks to, by the itty and by the bitty, get your revision mojo mojoing.
Revision: Take a Chainsaw to Those Little Darlings, Prune, Do No Harm, Be an Archaeologist, Move the Furniture Onto the Front Lawn, Flip the Gender
Originally posted on Madam Mayo blog, by C.M. Mayo, May 1, 2006
Revision on my mind… as I am revising the revision of the revision (of the revision) of my novel… which has already undergone a few chainsaw massacres… more than Texas-sized… Australia-sized (I’m talking 250 pages)… I am also gearing up to give a special one day workshop on Revision at the Writers Center this May 14th [2006]… So I recently asked a few writer friends for their thoughts on revision. Novelists Mary Kay Zuravleff and Carolyn Parkhurst were both in my writing group; first-hand I’ve seen how good they are with revision. Check out their websites to see what they’re up to– both have wonderful new novels out. Dinty W. Moore is the author of many books, most recently The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. Dawn Marano is fine writer of creative nonfiction and, bless her heart, the editor of my memoir, Miraculous Air. Known to all in literary Washington DC but the brain dead, Richard Peabody is a poet, fiction writer, editor, publisher and writing teacher. Check out his website– he’s offering a novel writing workshop.
Here’s what they had to say on revision:
“the smell pass, the hearing pass”
MARY KAY ZURAVLEFF “The prose on my pages doesn’t match what I’ve envisioned for drafts and drafts. Near the end, I make a pass for each of the senses. There’s the smell pass, the hearing pass, etc., as I try to vivify every sidelong glance. Then it’s time to prune it back so readers don’t choke on details!”
“first, do no harm”
CAROLYN PARKHURST “When facing revisions, I think it’s useful for a writer to begin from the same starting point as a doctor: first, do no harm. Revision is a vital part of the writing process, but it’s possible to revise all the life out of something if you’re not careful. Never lose sight of what was artful and compelling about the piece in its purest state: when it existed only in your imagination.”
“curiosity… questions”
DAWN MARANO “Substantive revision—as opposed to line-editing, that is, moving commas around and such—begins when a writer returns to a draft of her work with the curiosity of, say, an archaeologist. Arrayed before her are the traces of a lost civilization—in this case, sentences and paragraphs instead of material artifacts—that are waiting for her to see them with the fresh and patient eye of possibility: ‘What larger meaning or context might this perplexing fragment of thought I left undeveloped be a part of? What is this clever demurral or summarization disguising or helping me avoid writing about? What story am I really trying to tell myself with this assemblage of words on the page?’”
“the conscious choice that it belongs”
DINTY W. MOORE “Simply proofreading your second or third draft and fixing a few awkward sentences is similar to remodeling a room by dusting the end tables and rearranging the pillows on the sofa — not much changes. The true act of revision comes when a writer is willing to move each piece of furniture out onto the front lawn, roll up the area rugs, take the pictures down from the wall, and then, on a case by case basis, decide what returns to the room, and where it will be situated. Sometimes a favorite table has to be left out on the curb for recycling, because it just doesn’t fit anymore; maybe some new furniture is purchased (a new scene is written); perhaps the walls are painted a new color (voice or point-of-view shifts); or maybe all of the furniture is returned but in a different configuration — what’s important is that nothing goes back inside the metaphorical living room until and unless the writer makes the conscious choice that it belongs.”
“No fear”
RICHARD PEABODY “I think revision is about testing the boundaries of what’s on the page, having no fear of pushing to the logical extreme. You need to jettison your baggage about plot, invest in your characters (and their voices), and trust your guts. When all else fails flip the gender.”
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
BY C.M. MAYO — October 4, 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.
Texas is giant in so many ways, including its literature. However, the literature on its Guadalupe Mountains is relatively sparse. This isn’t surprising when you consider how remote these mountains are—by car from El Paso, only after an hour and half do they rise up to their full splendor from the floor of the Texas desert. They make for a “sky island,” watered woodlands surrounded by the salty desert of what used to be a vast sea. There were never any towns in the Guadalupes’ wooded valleys; into the 19th century these valleys were inhabited by the Mescalero Apaches for seasonal hunting camps, until they were driven out by the U.S. Army, and the railroad tracks laid down across the desert, alongside the telegraph lines. Suffice to say, without the aid of fossil fuels, first coal, then oil, it was brutally difficult to travel over this region. Even today most travelers blow on by the Guadalupes at 80 miles an hour towards points west or east. As one who has served as an artist-in-residence in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, I well know what glories (and not a few rattlesnakes) these mountains hold. I am at work on my memoir / portrait of Far West Texas but of course, others have written about the Guadalupes, and their works inform mine. Herewith, a few favorites from my working library:
“The Guadalupe Mountains stand nearly 9,000 feet tall, spanning the far western fringe of Texas, the border of New Mexico, and the meeting point of the Southern Plains and Chihuahuan Desert. Long an iconic landmark of the Trans-Pecos region, the Guadalupe Mountains have played a critical role for the people in this beautiful corner of the Southwest borderlands. In the late 1960s, the area was finally designated a national park.
“Drawing upon published sources, oral histories, and previously unused archival documents, Jeffrey P. Shepherd situates the Guadalupe Mountains and the national park in the context of epic tales of Spanish exploration, westward expansion, Native survival, immigrant settlement, the conservation movement, early tourism, and regional economic development. As Americans cope with climate change, polarized political rhetoric, and suburban sprawl, public spaces such as Guadalupe Mountains National Park remind us about our ties to nature and our historical relationships with the environment.”
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W.C. Jameson’s Legend and Lore of the Guadalupe Mountains (University of New Mexico Press, 2007) and The Guadalupe Mountains: Island in the Desert (Texas Western Press, 1994), with tales of Indians, wildest nature, secret gold mines and ghosts, are essential reading for any would-be Hollywood screenwriter.
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A Brush with Passion: The Work of Clark Cox, edited by Wendy Parish and Jeannie Sillis (Carlsbad Caverns-Guadalupe Mountains Association, 2003) is my personal favorite. Clark Cox (1861-1936) was a professional scene painter for opera and theater. For some time he worked out of New Orleans, then moved to Dallas, at which point he began to make annual pilgrimages to paint landscapes in the Guadalupe Mountains. His strike me as the kind of watercolors Beatrix Potter would have painted, had she ventured so far afield. And having hiked these landscapes myself, these many decades later, I so admire how Cox captured their subtle beauty.
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Paul Cool’s Salt Warriors: Insurgency on the Rio Grande (Texas A & M University Press, 2008) is a major scholarly history of the El Paso Salt War of 1877, a bloody conflict between newly-arrived Anglo businessmen and local Mexican salt harvesters. I had the honor of interviewing the author for this blog back in 2016.
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Mark Santiago’s A Bad Peace and a Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795-1799 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018) is a superbly researched history of a war that had been, essentially, entirely forgotten. From the catalog copy:
“This book challenges long-accepted historical orthodoxy about relations between the Spanish and the Indians in the borderlands separating what are now Mexico and the United States. While most scholars describe the decades after 1790 as a period of relative peace between the occupying Spaniards and the Apaches, Mark Santiago sees in the Mescalero Apache attacks on the Spanish beginning in 1795 a sustained, widespread, and bloody conflict. He argues that Commandant General Pedro de Nava’s coordinated campaigns against the Mescaleros were the culmination of the Spanish military’s efforts to contain Apache aggression, constituting one of its largest and most sustained operations in northern New Spain. A Bad Peace and a Good War examines the antecedents, tactics, and consequences of the fighting.
“This conflict occurred immediately after the Spanish military had succeeded in making an uneasy peace with portions of all Apache groups. The Mescaleros were the first to break the peace, annihilating two Spanish patrols in August 1795. Galvanized by the loss, Commandant General Nava struggled to determine the extent to which Mescaleros residing in “peace establishments” outside Spanish settlements near El Paso, San Elizario, and Presidio del Norte were involved. Santiago looks at the impact of conflicting Spanish military strategies and increasing demands for fiscal efficiency as a result of Spain’s imperial entanglements. He examines Nava’s yearly invasions of Mescalero territory, his divide-and-rule policy using other Apaches to attack the Mescaleros, and his deportation of prisoners from the frontier, preventing the Mescaleros from redeeming their kin.
“Santiago concludes that the consequences of this war were overwhelmingly negative for Mescaleros and ambiguous for Spaniards. The war’s legacy of bitterness lasted far beyond the end of Spanish rule, and the continued independence of so many Mescaleros and other Apaches in their homeland proved the limits of Spanish military authority. In the words of Viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez, the Spaniards had technically won a ‘good war’ against the Mescaleros and went on to manage a ‘bad peace.'”
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Last but not least of the favorites to mention, is Donald P. McGookey’sGeologic Wonders of West Texas (self-published, second printing, 2007). This is uber-nerdy geology, but essential reading for anything to do with the Guadalupe Mountains, for these are geologic wonders indeed. To quote McGookey, page 70:
“The Guadalupe Mountain rocks are of a very large and long barrier reef, the Capitan Reef. This type of barrier reef is very similar to the present day Great Australian and Belize Barrier Reefs. The continuity of sediments down the slope into the basin facies are the best found anywhere in the world. In places like McKitrick Canyon it is an easy hike from rocks of the top part of the reef to those deposited in the basin. Total relief between the reef and deeper parts of the basin is over 5,000 feet.”
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Finally, two extra-crunchy videos:
Eleanor King’s video “Conflict Archaeology: The Untold History of the Buffalo Soldiers and the Apache in Texas”
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This recent Zoom by archeologist Dr Bryon Schroder is not about the Guadalupe Mountains per se, but about cutting-edge research on paleolithic hunters in the larger Big Bend Region of Far West Texas. I include it here because it gives an overview of peoples who would have also hunted in the Guadalupe Mountains.
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I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
“I have had numerous successful readings on Zoom. Check them out through my website at https://www.alenier.com/videos. I like the platform and I have been making opportunities for other poets through Zoom. Yes, of course, there is a future in online readings. You get a bigger more geographically diverse audience. It’s exhilarating.”— Karren Alenier
BY C.M. MAYO — September 27, 2021 UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).
Karren Alenier is one of my very favorite poets, both for the quality of her poetry, but also for her enthusiasm for poetry and the generosity of her spirit. If memory serves, I met Karren 20 years ago when I was selected to read my work at the Joaquin Miller Cabin Poetry Series in Washington DC. And later I was delighted to learn that, in different years, an eon earlier, we had both studied with Paul Bowles in Tangiers. Karren has written about Paul and his wife Jane— read all about that in her The Anima of Paul Bowles. Since 2017 she also hosts a richly varied blog on publishing, https://alenier.blogspot.com.
I’ve been meaning to get Karren here for a Q & A for some time now; her new book, How We Hold On, makes for the perfect occasion.
C.M. MAYO: What inspired you to write How We Hold On? Can you talk about its genesis?
KARREN ALENIER: The loss of my husband Jim Rich is what inspired this manuscript, especially the poems about Jamaica. Jim loved the Jamaican poems and urged me to get them published. The model for this work was my prize-winning book Looking for Divine Transportation. Both have 4 sections beginning with family poems and a section where poems from another country are featured.
C.M. MAYO:As you were writing, did you have in mind an ideal reader?
KARREN ALENIER: Sometimes books of poetry are consciously written and other times, the work is collected. How We Hold On is a collected work driven by my desire to preserve the memory of my late spouse and the love we shared. Love poetry always has an audience. I also hoped that the poems would bring solace to some of Jim’s grieving friends.
Other readers I hope to reach are those interested in poetic form. Grace Cavalieri, always a quick study, said that I had a different strategy for each poem and by that I took it that she meant I used a wide variety of poetic forms to contain what I was feeling and expressing. For audience interested in current events, I also managed to use very new work done as letters to my great grandfather who died in the 1918 pandemic flu.
C.M. MAYO:Which poets have been the most important influences for you? And for How We Hold On in particular?
KARREN ALENIER: Normally, I would say Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein have been important influences and they are over all, but for this work, I would say Elizabeth Bishop (form), Ed Hirsch (absurdity), Allen Ginsberg (passion), Guillaume Apollinaire (disconnected leaps).
C.M. MAYO: Which poets and writers are you reading now?
KARREN ALENIER: Two poets who have caught my attention recently are Harryette Mullen (very Steinian) and Diane Seuss (lovely on absurdity). I read a lot of fiction. I’m currently reading Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults. I love stories that take place in the countries of the Mediterranean.
C.M. MAYO: How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to call down the Muse with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
KARREN ALENIER: I’m used to being interrupted. I grew up in house of six children. I was eldest. The point is when I am working, I am able to ignore the lure of online wonders like YouTube, blogs and newspapers. However, I like to work in silence and know that listening to radio, TV, or music is too distracting. Yes, my smart phone is an interrupter. Still I don’t turn that off because someone important to me might reach out and need me. Some of my friends get annoyed that I don’t read their Facebook pages except occasionally. The best way for me to get something done is to put it on my list of things to do. I take great pleasure in ticking off those items.
C.M. MAYO:How has it been to read poetry on Zoom? Do you see the future all Zoom-y?
KARREN ALENIER: I have had numerous successful readings on Zoom. Check them out through my website at https://www.alenier.com/videos. I like the platform and I have been making opportunities for other poets through Zoom. Yes, of course, there is a future in online readings. You get a bigger more geographically diverse audience. It’s exhilarating.
C.M. MAYO:For those looking to publish a book of poetry, what would be your most hard-earned piece of advice?
KARREN ALENIER: If a publisher says s/he likes part of your manuscript, ask immediately if you can send a revision. Don’t delay by feeling sorry for yourself or thinking someone else might like the whole thing. Take your openings when they present.
C.M. MAYO:What’s next for you as a poet?
KARREN ALENIER: I’m currently working on poems in response to Tender Buttons (Gertrude Stein) and I’m taking others along for the experience. I expect to announce the Tender Buttons anthology project in October 2021. The first of three books will be published by The Word Works in 2022.
C.M. MAYO: Can you share your most vivid memory of Paul Bowles?
KARREN ALENIER: In August 1982, I arrived for a writing appointment at his apartment door in Tangier wearing a djellaba over my clothes and purse to protect myself from pickpockets or other people interested in my things. I was hot and when invited in by Paul Bowles, I asked if he would mind if I took off my robe. He looked at me with surprise and said, “oh, I forgot my jacket.” He grabbed his jacket and put it on and then he said, “Of course, you may take your djellaba off.”
C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about your involvement with The Word Works?
KARREN ALENIER: I was the first poet published by The Word Works in 1975. The next year, I started workshopping poetry with other members of Word Works at the Joaquin Miller cabin in Washington, DC’s Rock Creek Park. By 1978, I started the Joaquin Miller Cabin Poetry Series which has been running every summer since then. In 1986, I became the second president and chairperson of the board of directors. In 1987, under my leadership, the Washington Prize moved from a single poem contest to a book prize with a cash purse. In 1989, I founded the Capital Collection imprint (now known as the Hilary Tham Capital Collection) which awards book publication to poets who volunteer for literary organizations like The Word Works. In 1999, I started the Café Muse Literary Salon at Strathmore Hall in Bethesda, Maryland. The series has been running monthly ever since with the excellent help of many volunteers. In 2009, Nancy White became the third president of Word Works. She leads the publishing and, while staying involved in the publishing, I spend more time on public programs. I have innovated many programs for The Word Works and pride myself on this strategy—I tell our volunteers I expect them to have fun and if they aren’t, they shouldn’t continue.
how we hold on
my mother kept a steamer trunk with classic clothes immune to fad my husband owned a cedar chest packed with bits reins and riding whip
I am neither fashionista nor ardent horse enthusiast in my chest an aging heart brims with blood both beautiful and swift
—Karren L. Alenier
when it drops you gonna feel it
we traded Internet for mosquito net cocooned for sleep under a halo of white mesh the sea beating the coral cliffs of Negril a lullaby of dominoes geckos the kingpins in the road hawking anythingyouwant the minstrel Fire improvising Toots Hibbert’s “Pressure Drop” a daughter hopeful that her father in a Sav-la-Mar hospital would kick lung cancer with an herbal medicine something six chemo treatments in Georgia couldn’t do
BY C.M. MAYO — September 20, 2021 UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).
I find it startling in the extreme, here in the present rhinocerosness, to reencounter Neil Postman’s lecture on “The Surrender of Culture to Technology” from 1997. Actually, I read Postman’s Technolopy: The Surrender of Culture to Technology a few years ago, but just this week I revisited his lecture apropos of that, archived on YouTube. Perhaps you, dear reader, will find it as eerie as I did.
P.S. So 2021: Wingwoman Géraldine Fasnacht jumps off the Eiger.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
