BY C.M. MAYO — December 20, 2021 UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).
One of Ours by Willa Cather Brilliant and profound, One of Ours is the American novel about that episode of madness known as the First World War that will ring through the centuries. It has been a few years now that I’ve been working through Cather’s oeuvre (so far: The Professor’s House, O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop); my main wonder is why I didn’t start sooner. (For those whose children attend high schools which faculty have seen fit to remove Cather from the English class syllabi, I point to Jonathan Leer’s Radical Hope, listed below.)
Child of the Sun by Lonn Taylor Historian Lonn Taylor’s last book, a beautiful and moving memoir of his childhood in the Philippines. P.S. You can listen in to my interview with Taylor about Far West Texas here.
The City of Hermes: Articles and Essays on Occultismand The King in Orange by John Michael Greer It was during and after writing my own work, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, that I came to appreciate how rare and excellent a scholar of the history of metaphysical religion and of the occult we have in John Michael Greer.
Say “Texas” and the images that pop into most people’s minds do not include literary figures and their oeuvres. But trust me, as one who has been working on a book about Far West for more years than I care to count, Texas has one helluva literary culture, a long-standing and prodigious production, yea verily flowing out as if by pumpjacks, and if not all, a head-swirling amount of it is finer than fine, and there are legions of readers who sincerely appreciate and celebrate it, as do I. Know this: Lonn Taylor and Don Graham, both of whom just passed away, were giants among Texas literati.
LONN TAYLOR(1940-2019)
From my Texas Bibliothek: A selection of many treasured works by Lonn Taylor.
Lonn Taylor was an historian who wrote about many things including cowboys and the American flag and every nook and cranny and corner of Texas, so it seemed, always with erudition, elegance, and heart. I had some correspondence with Taylor before I met him in Fort Davis– to which town in Far West Texas he had retired with his wife Dedie after a career as an historian at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. In his book-cave of an office below the copper-red shadow Sleeping Lion Mountain, I interviewed him for the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project (listen in any time). I was at once charmed, grateful, and mightily enlightened about multitudinous things Texan. Later I saw him and Dedie at the annual Center for Big Bend Studies conference, and over the next few years, many an email zinged back and forth. I am but one of many people who counted Lonn as a personal friend and a mentor, and I am saddened by his loss more than I can say.
Taylor’s works are a cultural treasure, a monument. And he was wondrously productive. However did he manage to write all these books and his Rambling Boy column for the Big Bend Sentinel, and keep up with what surely must have been a daily hurricane of email? I was just about to email him a congratulations on his latest book, Turning the Pages of Texas, when I got the news from Carmen Tafolla, President of the Texas Institute of Letters, that in an instant– a stroke on June 26– he was gone from this world.
Also from my Texas Bibliothek: Some essential works by film historian and literary critic Don Graham.
Just days before Lonn’s passing, on June 22, Don Graham also died of a stroke. I never met Graham, the renowned J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of English at the University of Texas Austin, but I thought I would very soon, for I had been emailing with him about arranging a podcast interview on the latest of his many splendid books about Texas: Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber and the Making of a Legendary American Film.
I do not think it is possible to comprehend Texas as a cultural and political entity without taking into account the imaginal influences (and sometimes very weird echos) of fiction and films– and, in particular, the film based on Edna Ferber’s best-selling novel, Giant. And no one wrote about all of that, and Giant, more lucidly than Don Graham.
My amiga Cecilia Autrique at the Center for Big Bend Studies Conference, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas, November 2017. Her paper is “American Protestants, Civil Society Organizations, and Temperance on the US-Mexico Border, 1920-1930”
Earlier this month I traveled the loooooooong way out from Mexico City via Houston and then via El Paso to Alpine, TX– (that latter stretch through the Far West Texas desert, spectacular though it be, not for the caffeine-deprived)– to participate in the annual Center for Big Bend Studies (CBBS) conference at Sul Ross State University.
I’ve been working on this book about Far West Texas, which includes the Big Bend, for an age & an eon, so last year, when I was invited to present at the 2016 CBBS conference, I was honored but flummoxed. My book hadn’t– and still hasn’t– been published and, anyway, it’s not a scholarly work but, as I have begun describing it, a lyrical and personal portrait of place. No, no, what they wanted was for me to talk about my book published in 2014, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. I was flummoxed again, for that book about the book by the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution has zip to do with the Big Bend!
Well, it turned out that anything and everything about the Mexican Revolution is game for the CBBS conference, which is multidisciplinary and covers subjects relevant not only to the Big Bend but the surrounding regions, which include the Texas Panhandle, New Mexico, and northern Mexico’s states of Chihuahua and Coahuila.
So last year at CBBS I presented Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, andI came away mightily impressed– so much so that I decided to present again this year and I recruited my amiga, Mexican historian Cecilia Autrique, to present her outstanding paper, “American Protestants, Civil Society Organizations, and Temperance on the US-Mexico Border, 1920-1930.” (This paper stems from her PhD thesis at the UNAM in Mexico City, which I hope will be published as a book in both Spanish and English, for it provides vital historical context for any discussion of the current US-Mexico border and narcotrafficking issues.)
Lt. John Bigelow, Jr., U.S. Tenth Cavalry
This year I presented my paper on “John Bigelow, Jr: Officer in the Tenth Cavalry, Military Intellectual, and Nexus Between West and East”– much of which material will appear in my book in-progress, World Waiting for a Dream: A Turn in Far West Texas.
Look for the paper on my website shortly; in the meantime, for those interested, my blog posts about Bigelow are here and here, and the post about his brother, author, world-traveler, life-long friend to Kaiser Wilhelm II, and pioneer magazine publisher Poultney Bigelow, is here. And the selected bibliography on John Bigelow, Jr. and the Bigelow family, and related subjects, which I handed out at the conference, is here.
Bigelow’s relevance to the Big Bend is direct: he was stationed there more than once, scouted all around the region, and indeed, he is an officer already well known to any and all who would study the Indian Wars and the Buffalo Soldiers. I trust I have been able to add new dimensions and insights to his importance for this region, and the West as a whole.
HIGHLIGHTS
One of the downsides of a bustling conference (indeed, a downside to just about everything nifty in the human experience) is that it is impossible to be in two places at the same time! It can also be a challenge to fit fascinating and vital conversations, such as they pop up, into the precise times allotted for coffee breaks and lunch. Alas, there were talks I am tremendously sorry to have missed or to have had to slink into half way through.
Just a few– a very few– of the highlights for me:
Felix Almaraz channeling a Franciscan missionary (and in costume!)
Once again, Al González of Chiricuahua Books busted my shoe budget for the year. I took home a biography of Jack Hays and two very rare books by cowboys about Marfa, Texas.
Steve Black, who gave a super crunchy keynote about Eagle Nest Canyon
A keynote speech by lead archaeologist Steve Black about Eagle Nest Canyon at Langtry, Texas > One of the most jaw-dropping canyons in Texas. Check out my mini-video of the entrance of Eagle Nest Canyon from a visit a couple of years ago here.
(Perchance you wonder, did we see the Marfa Lights? Not this time. But I have indeed seen them and on four different occasions.)
AND A NOTE ON EL PASO’S ELROY BODE
As you might imagine, flying from Mexico City to El Paso via Houston, and back, apart from being a sardine-y experience, was the perfect opportunity to get some reading done.
I have belatedly discovered Elroy Bode! (pronounced Bo-dee). Doubly belatedly, for Bode passed away only months ago. (See his obituary in the El Paso Times.)
I devoured Bode’s El Paso Days and got started on In a Special Light. As the blurbs on his books attest, Bode is much-admired and even beloved by many Texan writers and readers of a literary bent, but he remains obscure, not only outside the region but, as my visit to El Paso’s Barnes & Noble attests, even in his home town. (Nope, the Barnes & Noble did not have in-store even one copy of Elroy Bode’s — “who? Brady?”– several books. But for, like, totally sure, they did have, for the man in front of me in the customer service line, Exploding Kittens.)
Poet Naomi Shihab Nye says: “Elroy Bode is one of the most essential writers the state of Texas has ever been lucky enough to call its own. In a voice that is at once deeply descriptive and eloquently minimalist, he illuminates our corners, dim memories, streets, fields, prairies, hills, hours, and the hardest of days. His no-frills frankness and steady attentiveness have always had a radiant, carifying power.”
As I read I tagged so many of Bode’s lines but perhaps the best, most representative of all is this one, from “Earth-Life” in the collection of his poetic essays, In a Special Light:
“I need the El Paso countryside. I need to hear the call of redwing blackbirds from salt cedars along an Upper Valley canal. I need to stand in a pecan grove and feel the breeze that moves through it– a breeze that reminds me of other breezes in other trees in other, almost forgotten times. I need to see stretched of plowed land where, in the distance, humans are reduced in scale and become of no greater importance to the eye than a rooster in a yard, a tractor in a field.” — Elmer Bode, In a Special Light
After the CBBS conference I spent an afternoon in the El Paso Public Library’s Border Heritage archive where I looked up Elroy Bode and Amado Duro. More about those two caballeros literarios anon.
