My writing assistants Uliberto Quetzalpugtl and Washingtoniana Quetzalpugalotl snoofling at the mysteries.
For those interested in my publications, podcasts, and writing workshops, after a loooooong hiatus, I am resuming the newsletter, herewith commencing a new schedule of posting it on Madam Mayo blog every fifth Monday of the month (when there is a fifth Monday, that is to say, a few times a year).
I will also be sending out the newsletter to subscribers via email. If you would like to receive only the emailed newsletter, just zap me an email, I’ll be delighted to add you to my list. (If you’ve already signed up, stay tuned. I’ve had to switch my emailing service from Mailchimp to Mad Mimi, a bit of a process. Long story short, I give Mailchimp a black banana. Mashed in the noggin!)
If in addition or instead you’d like to sign up for the Madam Mayo blog post alerts every Monday via email, just hie on over to the sidebar (or, if you’re on an iphone, scroll down to the end of this post) for the signup. Welcome!
PODCASTS
“WORDS ON A WIRE”: Award-winning writer and Chair of the UTEP Creative Writing Department Daniel Chacón interviews me about my book Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual (which includes my translation of Madero’s 1911 book). This interview with Daniel Chacón was a special honor and delight for me because while my book is a work of scholarship, it is at the same time a work of creative nonfiction. It turned out to be a very fun interview, if I do say myself. >> Listen in anytime here.
Still in production, but allllllllmost ready: The MARFA MONDAYS Podcasting Project resumes with #21: a reading of my longform essay “Miss Charles Emily Wilson: Great Power in One.” Researching and writing this rearranged all the furniture in my mind about Texas, the US-Mexico border, Florida, the Indian Wars, and much more… Miss Charles is someone everyone should know about.
My gosh, it’s unsettling to read a story I wrote so long ago (maybe 1993 or 1994?). And “Majesty” is a strange story, and stranger still to be rereading in this age of the iPhone. It’s set in an Arizona luxury golf resort / spa in the late 1980s / early 1990s–another world, so to say, and on multiple levels. I recall the fun I had playing with the Alice in Wonderland imagery– I had recently been introduced by Douglas Glover to the German novel The Quest for Christa T. and the idea of the story as a net, an important influence on my fiction writing ever since.
Get your copy from all the usual suspects, including amazon.com
GIVAL PRESS POETRY AWARD CONTEST JUDGEDBY YOURS TRULY
Back in January, as the winner of the most recent Gival Press Poetry Award (for Meteor), I selected the winner for this year from an excellent batch of anonymous manuscripts. Here’s the press release from Gival Press:
February 6, 2020 For Immediate Release Contact: Robert L. Giron
(Arlington, VA) Gival Press is pleased to announce that Matthew Pennock has won the Gival Press Poetry Award for his collected titled The Miracle Machine. The collection was chosen by judge C.M. Mayo. The award has a cash prize of $1,000.00 and the collection will be published this fall.
“With a craftsman’s deftest precision and a thunder-powered imagination on DaVinci wings, the author recreates a lost world within a lost world that yet—when we look—shimmers with life within our world. Elegant, wondrously strange, The Miracle Machineis at once an elegy and a celebration, tick-tock of the tao.” —C.M. Mayo, author of Meteor
About the Author
Matthew Pennock is the author of Sudden Dog (Alice James Books, 2012), which won the Kinereth-Gensler Award. As per the terms of that award, he joined the board of Alice James Books in 2011, In 2014, he co-created AJB’s editorial board with executive editor Carey Salerno, and then became the board’s first chairperson, a position he held until 2020. He received his MFA from Columbia University and his PhD from the University of Cincinnati. His poems have been widely published in such journals as Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, New York Quarterly, LIT, and elsewhere. He currently owns and operates a learning center outside of Washington, D.C.
I am working on a book so I have no workshops yet scheduled for 2020. For my students, and anyone else interested in creative writing, I will continue to post on some aspect of craft and/or creative process here at Madam Mayo blog on the second Monday of the month.
> View the archive of Madam Mayo workshop posts here.
Meanwhile, I’m putting together a new workshop on applying poetic techniques to fiction and creative nonfiction… More news about that in the next newsletter.
Clifford Garstang, who did a Q & A for this blog in 2019, has posted his annual Literary Magazine rankings. Dear writerly readers looking to publish, while of course his, mine, yours, or anyone’s rankings of literary magazines are subject to debate, take this as a valuable and free resource!
Speaking of publishing, that usually involves a heaping helping of rejections. Well, I say, micro freaking deal! Rev that sense of humor! Need some assistance in that department? Here’s what Jia Jiang learned from 100 days of rejection:
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There’s more to Mexico than beaches & pyramids & Frida chunches… (Chunches: That’s Mexican for tchotchkes. Not to be confused with Ughyur raisin-drying facilities.) For anyone interested in the rich cultural heritage of Mexico, check out Richard Perry’s long-ongoing blog, Arts of Colonial Mexico. Richard writes: “For the New Year, we plan to highlight monuments and art works in Oaxaca and Yucatan as well as in Guanajuato, Puebla and Tlaxcala.”
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An email from Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka, editor of Loch Raven Review:
Dear Fellow Translators,
I want to spread the word about Loch Raven Review’s role in showcasing poetry translated from a variety of languages, featuring as a rule one language per each issue’s bilingual section. Since 2011, when I accepted the responsibility of the Poetry Translations Editor, Loch Raven Review has featured 21 sections of poetry in translation. I’ve compiled a list of all the sections, starting with the Spanish language, followed by the expected and unexpected languages, such as Catalan, Mayan or Kurdish, at http://danutakk.wordpress.com/loch-raven-review/
I’ve made it a point to engage local area translators, starting with Yvette Neisser and Patricia Bejarano Fisher, then Nancy Naomi Carlson, Barbara Goldberg, Katherine E. Young, Nancy Arbuthnot, Zeina Azzam, and then Zackary Sholem Berger, Xuhua Lucia Liang, and Maritza Rivera in the most recent LRR Volume 15, No. 2, 2019.
Starting in 2018 we have nominated four translations for the Pushcart Award.
I feel proud and happy to be able to bring together poets who write in such a variety of languages, and the translators who make the poems available to the English language readers.
Wishing you all a peaceful, creative, and joyful 2020,
Danka
Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka
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Emma Lawton on “What Parkinson’s Taught Me”:
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There is nothing you cannot do! Says Tao Porchon-Lynch, the world’s oldest yoga teacher– who recently passed away at 101. She made 98 look like 18. Bless you, Tao.
Another year of unusually intensive reading, mainly for my book in-progress on Far West Texas, hence this list is extra crunchy with geology, dinosaurs, Westerns, guns, and technology (yet somehow, like a pair of strawberry puddings amongst the platters of BBQ, Emma and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie slipped in there…)
In the Shadow of the Machine: The Prehistory of the Computer and the Evolution of Consciousness by Jeremy Naydler The maintream mediasphere seems to be overlooking this book, and not surprisingly, for it has been published by a small press that specializes in esoteric subjects. If “esoteric” gives you the readerly “cooties,” well, chill, if you possibly can because Naydler’s In the Shadow of the Machine stands as major contribution to the history of both technology and consciousness. If you’re wading through any of the current best-sellers on the perils of too much screentime and AI and all that, fine and important as some of those works may be (more about Carr below), I would suggest that instead, for a more panoramic and penetrating view of the challenge, start with Naydler.
2. Tie:
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather Historical fiction closely based on New Mexico and Church history but in all a soaringly lyrical work of empathic imagination. Deservedly one of the grand classics of 20th century American literature.
Emma by Jane Austen Ye olde read-it-by-the-fireside-with-a-cup-of-tea romance. But it’s a more serious work of literary art than it might appear; as a writer of fiction myself I found much to admire in Austen’s Emma. On that note, dear writerly readers, you might find of interest this piece in the Guardian.
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte Dino-out! Finally, the whole millions-upon-millions-upon-millions of years of dinosaurs falls into parade-like Ordnung! More fascinating stuff about T-Rex & Co. than I ever thought I would find fascinating! Super nerdy in the friendliest, most readable, and authoritative way. If you read one book on dinos, let it be this one.
Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier If you know who Jaron Lanier is, you can understand why he, and probably only he can get away with such a title for a commercially published book, one 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 [continue reading]
Dense yet elegantly lucid, Stephen L. Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst was published by O’Reilly Associates in 1995, on the eve of the explosion of email, well before that of social media. Astonishingly, it delineates the nature of our now King Kong-sized challenges with technology, when those challenges were, so it now seems, but embryonic. And Talbott writes with unusual authority, grounded in both philosophy and his many years of writing and editing for O’Reilly Media, a prime mover in the economic / cultural juggernaut of a complex, increasingly dispersed from its origin in California’s Santa Clara Valley, that has become known as “Silicon Valley.” CONTINUE READING
I’m not where I want to be with my writing here at the end of 2018 and Carr’s works detail many of the reasons why. But I’m moving forward by having deactivated my FB, reduced Twitter to once-a-month-ish courtesy tweet for my Q & A with another writer; generally ignoring LinkedIn, and still– still! thumb cemented in the dike!– refusing to use Whatsapp.
But please know, dear writerly reader, that even
as I wend my way, I would not pretend to know what would be best for you. And
this the Matterhorn of the challenge of our time: digital technologies that
might be zest for one person can prove hazardous for another. One needs both the
fortitude and courage to evaluate one’s own path– taking into account one’s
own circumstances, talents, weaknesses, predilections, obligations, and goals–
then strategize, and restrategize as needed.
My sense is that, primed by Carr’s and others’ works
in this vein, our cultural paradigm will definitively shift this winter with
the publication of Cal Newport’s Digital
Minimalism. Never mind what Newport actually has to
say (though as a big fan of his Deep Work, I expect it will be
juicy); in simply coining the term
“digital minimalism” Newport helps us move towards richer
and more effective ways of thinking about how, given our personal and
professional goals and well-being, we can optimize our use (or nonuse) of
digital technologies.
As I write now in December 2018 the reigning
paradigm is the same one we’ve had since forever: if it’s digital and new it
must be better; those who resist are old fogeys. It’s a crude
paradigm, a cultural fiction. And it has lasted so long time in part because
those who resisted either were old fogeys and/or for the most part could not
articulate their objections beyond a vaguely whiney, “I don’t like
it.”
As an early adopter of digital technologies for
decades now (wordprocessing in 1987, email in 1996, website in 1998, blog in
2006, podcast and Youtube channel 2009, bought a first generation iPad and
first generation Kindle, self-pubbed Kindles in 2010, etc.), I have more than
earned the cred to say, no, my little grasshoppers, no, if it is digital and it
is new it might, actually, maybe, in many instances, be very bad for you.
In other words, adopting a given digital
technology does not necessarily equate with “progress”; neither does
not adopting a given digital technology necessarily equate with backwardness. I
so often hear that “there is no choice.” There is in fact is a
splendiferous array of choices, and each with a cascade of consequences. But we
have to have our eyes, ears, and minds open enough to perceive them, and the
courage to act accordingly.
I wish my wiser self could have time traveled to
tell my younger self, Be more alert to the ways you invest your time and
attention. Be aware that the digital can be, in some ways and sometimes, more
ephemeral than paper (and not necessarily ecologically so friendly, either).
Social media mavens are not reading the kinds of books you want to write
anyway, for they lack the time and the attention span. Social media
“friends” may be but are not necessarily your friends; and until you
try to communicate with and encounter them outside these networked public
spaces, e.g., in the real world, and via one-on-one private communication such
as snail mail, telephone, and email, you’re in a hall of mirrors. With almost
every app, every platform, some corporation is harvesting your attention and
data for shareholder value– and all the while conjuring up new ways to grab
even more. Life goes by, zip.
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.)
