The Typewriter Manifesto – C.M. Mayo's Book Notes & Convos

Newsletter: C.M. Mayo’s Podcasts, Publications, and Workshops, Plus Cyberflanerie (Corona Virus-Free Edition!)

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.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

“Majesty,” one of the stories from my collection Sky Over El Nido (U Georgia Press, 1996), appears in Down on the Sidewalk: Stories About Children and Childhood from the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, edited by Ethan Laughman.

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
JUDGED BY 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 Machine is 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.

In case you missed it, here’s all the info about my poetry collection Meteor, which was published by Gival Press last spring, 2019.

SELECTED RECENT MADAM MAYO BLOG POSTS

Patti Smith’s Just Kids and David M. Wrobel’s Global West, American Frontier

Oscar Wilde in West Point, Honey & Wax in Brooklyn

Workshop Posts (every second Monday of the month):

Donald M. Rattner’s My Creative Space

This Writer’s PFWP and NTDN Lists: Two Tools for Resilience and Focus

A Refreshing Tweak: The Palomino Blackwing Pencil

Q & A

Q & A with Joanna Hershon on her New Novel St. Ivo

WORKSHOPS

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.

# # #

CYBERFLANERIE
(INSPIRING, INTERESTING, AND/OR USEFUL GLEANINGS)

My typosphere guru, philosopher Richard Polt, has posted about the dance based on his “Typewriter Manifesto”!

How to smombify millions of otherwise healthy, active, and creative people or, electrical failure as last defense: Nicholas Carr on TikTok.

Let’s be frank, shall we? Leslie Pietrzyk offers tips on post-MFA etiquette at Work-in-Progress.

BRAAAAAAAVOOOOOOOOOO, Judith Boyd!!!! What to Wear in Honor of the Death of a Significant Friend is a highly unusual essay well worth reading thrice.

Patricia Dubrava on Little Women

Andrea Jones “On Not Riding”

Philosopher Jeremy Naydler on light and thought. Poets and literary writers may find this especially energizing. (Not for those who get cooties from any whiff of woowoo, however.)

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:

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.”

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.

Also, since 2018 we’ve been busy catching up with LRR print volumes. In 2019 we published Volumes 10-13!
You may enjoy them at http://thelochravenreview.net/loch-raven-press-books/ and on our Facebook page.

Vol. 14 is going to press soon.

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

Emma Lawton on “What Parkinson’s Taught Me”:

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.

Cyberflanerie: Bill Cunningham, Brattlecast,
Rudy Rucker, Sturmfrei & More

“The Typewriter Manifesto” by Richard Polt,
Plus Cyberflanerie on Technology

Remembering Ann L. McLaughlin

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

“The Typewriter Manifesto” by Richard Polt, Plus Cyberflanerie on Technology

Viva, Richard Polt! He says that if you send him your address he will send you this postcard.

One of the themes in my work-in-progress on Far West Texas is the nature and pervasive influence of technology, especially digital technology– but also other kinds of industrial and military technology.

So what’s with the typewriter poem? The poem pictured above, “The Typewriter Manifesto,” is by philosophy professor Richard Polt. I’m a big fan of his blog and his book, The Typewriter Revolution.

My 56 year-old Hermes 3000
works fine, no need to update the OX! (Yes, ribbons are easy to score on eBay).

Nope, I am not a Luddite, but yep, I use a typewriter on occasion. When needed, I also use a Zassenhaus kitchen timer, a 30 year-old finance-nerd calculator (I used to be a finance nerd), and a battery-operated alarm clock. Yes, I know there are apps for all of those, and yes, I actually have downloaded and previously used all those apps on my smartphone but, e-NUFFF with the digital! Too many hours of my day are already in thrall to my laptop, writing on WORD or blogging, emailing, podcasting, maintaining my website, surfing (other blogs, mainly, and newspapers, plus occasional podcasts and videos), and once in a purple moon, making videos. Most days my iPhone stays in its drawer, battery dead, and I like it that way.

But kiddos, this not a writer-from-an-older-generation-resisting-innovation thing. Back when I was avid to adopt new technology. I had a cell phone when they were the size and shape and weight of a brick. I started my website in 1999! I bought the first Kindle model, and the first iPad model. I was one of the first writers to make my own Kindle editions (check out my latest). I started podcasting in 2010. I even spent oodles more time than I should have figuring out the bell-and-whistles of iTunes’ iBook Author app… and so on and so forth.

From Charles Melville Scammon’s “California Grays Among the Ice” Whales! Magnificent outside! Digestive juices inside!

In short, with technology, especially anything having to do with writing and publishing, I dove right into the deep end… and I have seen the whale. And it was not, is not, and will not be on my schedule to get swallowed whole.

(My schedule, by the way, is on my Filofax, a paper-based system, and paper-based for good reason.)

P.S. Ye olde “Thirty Deadly Effective Ways to Free Up Bits, Drips & Gimungously Vast Swaths of Time for Writing.” I hereby remind myself to take my own advice.

CYBERFLANERIE ON TECHNOLOGY

Richard Polt’s NYT Op-Ed “Anything But Human”

Mark Blitz explains Martin Heidegger on technology.

(The original pretzel-brain inducing essay by Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” with its handful of profound points coccooned within copious noodathipious deustcher Philosophieprofessor flooflemoofle, is here.)

On the express elevator to the top of my To Read tower: Richard Polt’s Heidegger: A Introduction

Recommended reading on technology:

E.M. Forster “The Machine Stops”

Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants

Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget

Dmitry Orlov’s Shrinking the Technosphere

Ted Koppel’s Lights Out

Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head

For those who can handle an esoteric discussion on technology without firecrackers going off in their wig, there is Dr. John C. Lilly:

S.J. Kerrigan on Lilly and the Solid State Entity

S.J. Kerrigan’s documentary John C. Lilly and the Solid State Entity

And here is the Lilly interview with Jeffrey Mishlove, for “Thinking Allowed” (the one where Dr. Lilly wears his earrings and Davy Crockett hat). Um, you will not eat your popcorn during this one.

Delighted to have surfed upon Tadeuz Patzek’s blog, LifeItself. Patzek is a professor of petroleum engineering, recently chair of the department at University Texas Austin. He is co-author with Joseph A. Tainter of Drilling Down. I read Drilling Down on Kindle this week, then bought the paperback to read it again.

Brief interview with Professor Patzek:

And here is what Patzek has to say about agrofuels in a long and extra crunchy lecture.

Nearing the tippy top of the “To Read” pile:

Philip Mirowski’s More Heat Than Light: Economics of Social Physics

Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

Nearing to the top of the “To Listen” list:

Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human Podcast

A FINTECH NOTE-OID ON NACTEDAs

As for financial technology, “A Letter to Jamie Dimon” by Adam Ludwin is best thing I have seen to date on cryptocurrencies.

Ludwin’s second most interesting quote:

“Cryptocurrencies are a new asset class that enable decentralized applications.“

In other words, “cryptocurrencies” are not currencies as we know them. “Crypto” is too sexy a word for what these actually are. So let’s call these puppies NACTEDAs. Rhymes with “rutabagas.”

Ludwin’s most interesting quote? Buried deep in the middle of his explanation of the nature of NACTEDAs is this colorful explanation of how NACTEDAs are generated or “mined”:

“Now we need an actual contest… On your mark, get set: find a random number generated by the network! The number is really, really hard to find So hard that the only way to find it is to use tons of processing power and burn through electricity. It’s a computing version of what Veruca Salt made her dad and his poor factory workers do in Willy Wonka. A brute force search for a golden ticket (or in this case, a golden number).”

This is not a point Ludwin makes (he sails on, with utter nonchalance): It is just a question of time– maybe a loooooooong time, albeit perchance a seemingly out-of-nowhere-pile-on-Harvey-Weinstein moment– until people recognize the environmental and social justice implications of such extravagant electricity use for generating NACTEDAs.

Can you say, opportunity cost?

As it stands, most people don’t or don’t want to grok where the magic invisible elixir that always seems to be there at the flip of a switch actually comes from…. which is, uh, usually… and overwhelmingly… coal. And neither do they grok that this flow of power is not never-ending, but a utility that can be cut off. Ye olde winter storm can do it for a day or so. More ominously, the grid itself can fail for lack of maintenance, or any one of one a goodly number of events– it need not necessarily be some cinematically apocalyptic cyberattack or epic solar flare. Can you say Puerto Rico. Can you say Mexico City after the earthquake. Can you say what happens when you don’t pay your bill. Or if the electrical company makes a mistrake. Lalalalala.

In any event, I wouldn’t recommend a camping vacation on some random mountaintop in West Virginia any time for… the rest of your life.

And herewith, hat tip to Root Simple, Lloyd Kahn demonstrates his low-tech dishwashing method. The duck part at the end is charmingly weird.