I've posted a few updates on the website for Miraculous Air-- new excerpts, interviews, etc. Plus there is an all-new cover for the Kindle edition, this one featuring the painting "Sunrise Over the Sierras," by Michael Cope, an American artist and founding owner of the Galería de Todos Santos in Baja California Sur, Mexico. (Plus, I corrected a few stray typos and such.) Here is the all new cover for the Kindle edition:
To get the Kindle,click here. By the way, if you already own the Kindle edition, simply ask amazon customer service to update your copy. (It isn't automatic, alas, but if you email their customer service, as has been my experience, they will update it for you lickety-split.)
Here is the previous Kindle cover from 2011:
(It's main virtue, methinks, is that it skips ye-olde-cardon-cactus-by-the-sea.) And here is the paperback edition cover, available from Milkweed Editions (2007):
It features the charming painting by Aligi Sassu of the Angel of Loreto carrying the Santa Casa, the house of the Virgin, to Loreto, Italy. Our Lady of Loreto is the patron saint of Baja California, and of aviators. And here is the hardcover, published by the University of Utah Press (2002):
My monthly-ish (very "ish") newsletter with updates on my podcasts, videos, articles, book reviews, guest-blogs, interviews, events, workshops and much more— and yes, including the writing assistants, pictured left— just went out to subscribers via mailchimp. I welcome you to read my November newsletter and, should you feel so moved, to sign up to receive the next newsletter (probably January-ish) here. P.S. My thoughts on writers' newsletters (dos and yucky no nos). > As always, I welcome your comments. Write to me here.
Waaaay back in 2006, as a kind of Ur-blog, for 365 consecutive days I posted a 5 minute writing exercise on my websiteboth for my writing workshop students and for myself— for I was then in the midst of a multi-year marathon in writing my epic novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. Five minutes? Well, that was doable. Anyway, "Giant Golden Buddha" and 364 more free 5 minute writing exercises are still there, right where they have always been, at this link. What prompts me to post about them today is that at the literary translators conference I attended recently a couple of people told me they loved the exercises but thought they were no longer on-line! I suspect that a few pathways got lost in the massive bramble in there when I redesigned the webpage last year. (Now the exercises are parked inside the new "For Creative Writers" pages). I have reestablished a prominent link to "Giant Golden Buddha" from my website's homepage, and I hope that does the trick of making the 5 minute exercises easier-than-la-de-da to find. By the way, most but not all of the exercises are mine. To boogy things up, I asked several writer and poet friends to contribute an exercise, and many generously did (you will find their names and websites on the relevant pages).
November 23 "Mpreg Story" Today's exercise is courtesy of Liz Henry, a poet, writer, translator and blogger who lives in Redwood City, California.Pick a pop culture male character, someone you think of as quintessentially masculine, like Han Solo, Sherlock Holmes, Superman, Aragorn, or Kermit the Frog. Write what he writes in his diary when he first realizes he's pregnant. How does he feel? What does he worry about? What does he do about it? Who will he tell? How will it affect his career? Is the (other) father his lover, his friend, or his worst enemy? Or, write a diary entry from a few months later, after the pregnancy starts to show and the baby or babies start to kick. Now you have the core of a strange mpreg story; mpreg, "male pregnancy" is a sub-genre of fan fiction. Whatever your own gender, this exercise will challenge your ideas about narration and gender normativity, and perhaps about canonical "ownership" of fictional characters. November 24 "Moo-moo Stuffing" In your novel, a character named Susie has concocted something for Thanksgiving which she calls "Moo-moo stuffing." What are the ingredients? (What are the ingredients according to Susie?) What does it taste like? Does anyone want to eat it? Does anyone eat it? What happens?
November 25 "Turkey Soup" Apropos of Thanksgiving left-overs, here is an exercise in generating specific sensory detail and also in using interesting verbs: write in scene in which your character makes turkey soup.
November 26 "Interesting Red" (Note: This is a variation on the exercise for October 10, "Interesting Pink".) There are are endless "browns", e.g., coffee, chocolate, rust-brown, tocacco-spit-brown, umber, amber, cumin, walnut, hazelnut, toast, fawn, cardboard-brown, ditchwater-brown, polluted-sky-brown, auburn, mahogany, liver, chestnut, roan, sepia, goat's-eye-brown, slime-brown, tawny, potato-brown, bronze, slug-brown, russet, caramel, rotting pumpkin, pot-roast, velvety-brown & etc. So: make a list of reds. Whatever occurs to you. Really dig around in there. (Feel free to check the Thesaurus if you need a jump-start.)
November 27 "Dog" Using detail that appeals to all your senses, describe one dog. Be sure to also describe the way it moves. And what can you say about its personality?
November 28 "Show Don't Tell: Crowded Shopping Mall" Using specific, vivid detail that appeals to the senses, how might you show that the shopping mall is crowded? (Do not use the words "shopping mall" or "crowded.")
November 29 "Living Room" Quickly, without a lot of thought, list at least 8 but no more than 12 pieces of furniture that might go into a fictional living room. Then choose five. Now, assign each of the 5: a color; a texture: a size; one other attritubute (can be anything). Now, give each of these 5 pieces a position: for example, is the sofa facing the window? Is the coffee table on top of the bearskin rug? Or is the cabinet in the corner next to the potted palm? Bonus exercise (beyond the 5 minutes): in 3- 4 sentences, describe the owner coming into this living room.
November 30 "Funny Expressions" Whenever it was time to go somewhere, my grandma used to say, "We're off, the captain shouted." I knew someone else who used to say, "it's all gone to hell in a handbasket." And lots of kids say, "Cool." The exercise is this: imagine an older character, and jot down 3 of his or her characteristic expressions. Do the same for a younger character, and then for a middle-aged character. Feel free to use expressions you've actually heard, or to make them up.
> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.
An age ago-- December 2011, to be exact-- I interviewed one of my favorite writers, literary journalist and poet Sara Mansfield Taber for my Conversations with Other Writers occasional podcast series. Well, it may have taken me almost four years, but today's the day the transcript finally went up onto my website.
Read and/or listen in any time to the interview with Sara Mansfield Taber (and find show notes) >>here<<.
(In case you were wondering whether I was somehow blessed with 48 hours in the day, the answer is no, ho ho, I use CLK Transcription, which I found via Debra Eckerling's Write Online! newsletter and I do warmly recommend them. It was Jane Friedman-- another warm recommendation-- who urged me to start posting transcripts of my podcasts.) You'll notice I've only posted one Conversation with Others Writer podcast this year-- an interview with Rose Mary Salum, the Houston, Texas-based Mexican poet, writer and visionary editor. Why not more? It's not for lack of enthusiasm on my part-- I relish talking with other writers-- but this year I've been putting my podcasting time into my "Marfa Mondays" Podcasting Project and the (related) book I'm writing about Far West Texas, World Waiting for a Dream: A Turn in Far West Texas. That said, on a recent foray to San Antonio-- en route to visit the rock art of the Lower Pecos-- I did manage to record an interview for my "Conversations with Other Writers" series with Mary Margaret McAllen, a super crujiente one about her splendid book, Maximilian and Carlota: Europe's Last Empire in Mexico. Look for that podcast to be posted after the holidays. I call my "Conversations with Other Writers" an "occasional series" because well, it's occasional, and it's occasional because podcasting on occasion beats not doing it at all! By the way, if you're interested in learning to podcast, while I may not be the world's Podcasting Poobah with a PhD in Sound Engineering, I do turn 'em out of the oven in my writerly fashion, and I'll tell you how in my podcasting workshop for the San Miguel Writers Conference this February. (You can also pick up my ebook based on my one day workshop for the Writer's Center, Podcasting for Writers & Other Creative Entrepreneurs, over in the Kindle store.) > Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.
The Lost Reels of Pancho Villa Mexican researcher and filmmaker Rocha goes to London, New York, Paris, and El Paso to search for the lost films from 1914 of Pancho Villa in the Battle of Ojinaga, staged under contract for the Mutual Film Corporation. Part 1 of 4 Part 2 of 4 Part 3 of 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH_EdxaIczY Part 4 of 4 Memorias de un mexicano (Memories of a Mexican) Classic documentary on the Mexican Revolution
Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers:
Embracing, Resisting, Escaping the Magnetic Pull of the Capital >>CONTINUE READING THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM
The panelists were Yours Truly (transcript of my talk follows), Jeffrey C. Barnett, Patricia Dubrava, and Clare Sullivan. In the audience: several very distinguished literary translators (lotus petals upon y'all). The Q & A was extra crunchy, and in true ALTA fashion, in the sweetest way. (Seriously, literary translators, and especially the crowd that regularly attends ALTA conferences, are angelically generous and encouraging. If any of you reading this have ever thought of trying literary translation and/or attending a literary translator's conference, my recommendation is, YES!)
[LAS TRES AMIGAS:
Yours Truly, Clare Sullivan, and Patricia Dubrava.]
[Jeffrey C. Barnett, C.M. Mayo, Patricia Dubrava]
Transcript of C.M. Mayo's Remarks
for the panel on
Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers
ALTA, Tucson, Arizona,
October 31, 2015
I started translating in Mexico City in the early 1990s. Mexico City is Mexico's capital, but it's not analogous to Washington DC or, say, Ottowa, Canada. The megalopolis, "the endless city," as Carlos Monsivaís calls Mexico City, is like Washington DC, New York, Boston, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles, all piled into one. In other words, its the political capital, financial capital, publishing capital, cultural capital, and television and movie capital. Oh, and business capital, too. Yes, there are other important cities in Mexico, and they have become more important in many ways, and some of them have some excellent writers and poets. But Mexico City is MEXICO CITY.
Back in the early 1990s, the ruling party, the PRI or Partido Revolucionario Institucional or Institutional Revolutionary Party was in power, about to enter the last decade of its more than 70— yes, 70—years in power. How did it last so long? There are many answers to that question but the main one relevant for our topic at hand is that the PRI attempted to bring everyone, whether farmers, campesinos, industrialists or intellectuals, and that would include poets and writers, under its own big tent. It had its ways. Stick and carrot— or bone, as Mexicans like to say.
You may be aware that after two consecutive presidential administrations under the PAN or the Partido Acción Nacional, over the past decade, Mexico's Presidency has since returned to the PRI. But it's not exactly a return to the past. Not exactly.
I'm not going to get all political on you, I simply want to underline the fact that back in early 1990s, the Mexican literary establishment, concentrated in Mexico City, was heavily influenced by and subsidized by the PRI government. Just to give you a notion of this: If you were to go into a library and look at some back issues of the leading Mexican literary and intellectual magazine of the time— of course that would be Octavio's Paz's Vuelta— you would see a large number of advertisements from government-owned entities and Televisa, the party-allied television conglomerate. There were literary gatekeepers, as there are everywhere in this world, but in Mexico City at that time, they were ginormously powerful. Octavio Paz was king.
Though Octavio Paz met his maker some years ago, in some ways things remain the same. Mexico City is where it's at. The government still plays an important, though lesser role. Letras Libres, successor to Vuelta, remains a leading magazine of influence, and in fact it does publish some of the best writing you'll find anywhere.
But since the early 1990s there have been political and economic sea-changes in Mexico. Power is more dispersed. Other political parties have become far more powerful. On the right and the left they rival the PRI and on many an occasion, beat the PRI at the ballot box.
And even more than the political and economic changes, the technological changes have been sea-changes. I'm talking about the rise of digital media, from blogging to YouTube, podcasting, Tweeting, FaceBooking, and publishing— and by the way, amazon is now in Mexico with www.amazon.com.mx.
To find a Mexican writer to translate, you no longer have to travel to Mexico City and get chummy with the powers that be who can make recommendations and, perhaps, invite the anointed to tea. Now, say, from Boston or Hong Kong or Cleveland, you can follow any given Mexican writer's blog, and comment thereupon. Or, say, send her a Tweet!
I would love to tell you the story of how, in the late 1990s, I started my bilingual magazine, Tameme, which published many Mexican writers, and my experiences with putting together the anthology, Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion— no easy task, since the idea of the TLC series is to provide writing about the whole country— and that would include writing from and about Baja California, Yucatan, Chiapas, Chihuahua...
At present I am translating a batch of Mexican writers: Ignacio Solares, a novelist born in Ciudad Juárez, long based in Mexico City; Agustín Cadena, who was born in the state of Hidalgo and is living in Hungary; Araceli Ardón who was born in San Miguel de Allende and lives in Querétaro; and yet another, Rose Mary Salum, who is from Mexico City and now based in Houston, Texas.
But I don't want to take time from my fellow panelists and what I hope will be a rich question and answer session. The main thing I want to emphasize is that, as literary translators, we can play a powerful role in influencing who and who is not read in English. Who to translate? It's good to ask for advice from the powers that be of the literary establishment in, say, Mexico or Cuba or Chile, and maybe even choose to translate one of them. They might be blast-your-wig-to-the-asteroid-belt fabulous!But we also have to recognize that there are power structures in literary communities, some of them entangled with political structures, and we need to acknowledge and examine, in our own minds, and our own hearts, what part we play in that or choose not to play. And why.
# # #
We may have been visiting the southwest this year, but ni modo, after the panel we ambled over to Sinbad's for Iraqi tea and babaganoushe.
Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.
Raymond Caballero is the author of Lynching Pascual Orozco: Mexican Revolutionary Hero and Paradox, the first major biography in over 40 years of one of the most important figures of the Mexican Revolution. Caballero is also the ex-mayor of El Paso, Texas and, in his words "a recovering lawyer"-- a background that no doubt helped him unravel the conspiracy he found revealed in the one hundred year-old records of the Culberson County Courthouse, apparently intended to cover up what really happened to Pascual Orozco and his men in the High Lonesome Mountains south of Van Horn in 1915. Caballero's Lynching Pascual Orozco is an important contribution to the history of not only the Mexican Revolution, but of the state of Chihuahua and of Far West Texas.
Quote from the interview:
"There were a lot of Mexicans very upset over the killing of Pascual Orozco... it was a huge controversy... In El Paso, in San Antonio, in Mexico City even President Carranza was asking for explanations... they wanted an investigation. So what happened was, 'whoa! We didn't kill some ordinary horse thief, we killed General Pascual Orozco, the biggest military hero of the early part of the Revolution! And what happens if the Mexicans in El Paso are able to pressure officials and they start a grand jury investigation there?' As a result of the concern that they had, the sheriff of Culberson County did something very unusual..."
-- Raymond Caballero
Listen to the Corrido del General Pascual Orozco sung by Los Tremendos Gavilanes on YouTube:
Remote as they are, the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of the US-Mexico border have a strangely magnetic pull. That may sound like a wild assertion, but the evidence comprises over 200 shamanistic rock art sites, many of them thousands of years old, and the fact that dozens of rock art enthusiasts, including myself, find themselves returning again and again.
It was on a meltingly hot August day in 2014 that I made my first foray into the canyonlands for the Rock Art Foundation’s visit to Meyers Spring. A speck of an oasis tucked into the vast desert just west of the Pecos, Meyers Spring’s limestone overhang is vibrant with petrographs, both ancient, but very faded, and of Plains Indians works including a brave on a galloping horse, an eagle, a sun, and what appears to be a missionary and his church.
I took home the realization that with Meyers Spring I had taken one nibble of the richest of banquets. In addition the rock art of the Plains Indians—Apaches and Comanches— of historic times, the Lower Pecos Canyonlands are filled with prehistoric art, principally Pecos River, Red Linear, and Red Monochrome. Of the three, Pecos River is comparable to the best known Paleolithic rock in the world, the caves of Lascaux in France.
I would have to return to the canyonlands— alas for my book’s time and travel budget!Not that the Rock Art Foundation charges more than a nominal sum for its tours. The individual tour to Meyers Spring, which lasted four hours, cost a mere 30 dollars. Everyone involved, including the guides, works for the foundation for free.
By December of 2014 I was back for another Rock Art Foundation tour, this one down into Eagle Nest Canyon in Langtry. Apart from rock shelters with their ancient and badly faded petrographs, cooking debris, tools, and even a mummy of a woman who—scientists have determined— died of chagas, Eagle Nest Canyon is the site of Bonfire Shelter, the earliest and the second biggest bison jump, after Canada’s Head Bashed-In, in North America. Some 10,000 years ago hunters drove hundreds of prehistoric bison—larger than today’s bison—over the cliff. And in 800 BC, hunters drove a herd of modern bison over the same cliff, so many animals that the decaying mass of unbutchered and partially butchered carcasses spontaneously combusted. In deeper layers dated to 14,000 years, archaeologists have found bones of camel, horse, and mammoth, among other megafauna of the Pleistocene.
DESCENT INTO EAGLE NEST CANYON,
DECEMBER 2014
Then in the spring of this year I visited the Lewis Canyon site on the shore of the Pecos, with its mesmerizing petroglyphs of bear claws, atlatls, and stars, and, behind a morass of boulders, an agate mirror of a tinaja encircled by petrographs.
LEWIS CANYON PETROGLYPHS,
MAY 2015
LEWIS CANYON TINAJA SITE WITH PETROGRAPHS,
BY THE PECOS RIVER,
MAY 2015
Not all but most of the Lower Pecos Canyonland rock art sites— and this includes Meyers Spring, Eagle Nest Canyon and Lewis Canyon— are on private property. Furthermore, visits to Meyers Spring, Lewis Canyon, and many other sites require a high clearance vehicle for a tire-whumping, paint-scraping, bone-jarring drive in. So I was beginning to appreciate the magnitude of the privilege it is to visit these sites. At Lewis Canyon, as I stood on the limestone shore of the sparkling Pecos in utter silence but for the crunch of the boots of my fellow tour members, I learned that less than 50 people a year venture to float down its length.
This October I once again traveled to the Lower Pecos, this time for the Rock Art Foundation’s annual three day Rock Art Rendezvous. Offered this year were the three sites I had already visited, plus a delectable menu that included White Shaman, Fate Bell, and—not for those prone to vertigo— Curly Tail Panther.
WHITE SHAMAN,
OCTOBER 2015
Just off Highway 90 near its Pecos River crossing, the White Shaman Preserve serves as the headquarters for Rock Art Rendezvous. After a winding drive on dirt road, I parked near the shade structure. From there, the White Shaman rock art site was a brief but rugged hike down one side of cactus-studded canyon, then up the other. I was glad to have brought a hiking pole and leather gloves. No knee surgery on the horizon, either. When I arrived at White Shaman, named after the central luminous figure, the sun was low in the sky, bathing the shelter’s wall and its reddish drawings in gold and turning the Pecos, far below, where an occasional truck droned by, deep silver.
The next morning, at the Rock Art Foundation’s tour of the Shumla Archaeological and Research Center in nearby Comstock,I heard Dr. Carolyn Boyd’s stunning talk about her book,The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative in the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos,which is forthcoming in 2016 from University of Texas Press. Dr. Boyd, whose work is based on 25 years of archaeological research in the Lower Pecos and a meticulous study of Mexican anthropology, argues that White Shaman, which is many thousands of years old, may represent the oldest known creation story in North America.(See Mary S. Black’s interview with Dr. Boyd, “Deciphering the Oldest American ‘Book.’”)
FATE BELL,
OCTOBER 2015
From the White Shaman Preserve, Fate Bell is a few minutes down highway 90 in Seminole Canyon State Park. More than any other site, this shelter in the cake-like layers of the limestone walls of a canyon, reminded me of the cave art I had seen in Baja California’s Sierra de San Francisco. Inhabited on and off for some 9,000 years, Fate Bell is the largest site in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. It has various styles of petrograph, including a spectacular group of anthropomorphs with what appear to be antlers and wings.
CURLY TAIL PANTHER,
OCTOBER 2015
Curly Tail Panther is a scoop of a cave about the size of a walk-in closet, but as if for Superman to whoosh in, set dizzyingly high on a cliff-side overlooking the Devils River. The back wall has an array of petrographs: red mountain lion, anthropomorphic figures, and geometric designs. The only access to Curly Tail Panther is by way of a narrow ledge. Drop your hiking pole or your sunglasses from here, and you won’t see them again. You might lose a character, too—in the opening of Mary Black’s novel, Peyote Fire, a shaman stumbles to his death from this very ledge. The Rock Art Foundation’s website made it clear, Curly Tail Panther is not for anyone who has a fear of heights. But who doesn’t? My strategy was to take a deepbreath and, like the running shoes ad says, Just do it.
