"Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla" A Longform Essay About the Mexican Literary Landscape and the Power of the Book

Get this essay about the Mexican literary landscape
 and the power of the book in KINDLE

My extra-crunchy long essay on the Mexican literary landscape and the power of the book is now available in Kindle.

Featured on the cover are my writing assistants, Uliberto Quetzalpugtl (aka Uls) and Washingtoniana Quetzalpugalotl (aka La Wash), both thinking profound thoughts... probably about the neighbor's cat. (As for books, they go for the corners.)

If you have been following my blog (in which case, bless you), you might be wondering, what in Timbuktu does this long essay on the Mexican literary landscape have to do with my current work in-progress on Far West Texas? Plenty, actually, starting with Cabeza de Vaca's gobsmackingly bizarre Informe. 

One of the several reasons I wrote this essay was to get my mind around the literary nuns of the baroque period— in Mexico, the prime and cherished example is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Another literary nun not mentioned in this essay, but who will appear in my book on Far West Texas, is María de Agreda, the Blue Lady. Much more about María de Agreda and her exterioridades anon.

Above all, I wrote "Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla" for U.S. friends and colleagues who want to get past the heavily-retailed clichés about Mexico. This essay is at once my love letter to Mexico and a distillation of all that I have come to understand after 30 years of living here and over two decades of writing about Mexico and translating Mexican literature. I sincerely hope it will invite you to consider our southern neighbor in new ways— and so, consider our own republic in new ways as well.

Read some excerpts from "Dispatch from the Sister Republic":

> Lord Kingsborough's Antiquities of Mexico

> What the Muse Sent Me About the Tenth Muse, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

> A Visit to the Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América, Mexico City

>> Get "Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla" in in Kindle here.<<



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Kindle edition

Also in the Kindle store you will find my memoir of yore, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico. Available as always in Kindle from Dancing Chiva, it will be for free in the Kindle store—yes, free—for two days later this month, July 22 and 23. So, I invite you to note those free days in your calendar, or shell out the clams. Or not. Or whatever. I invite you to read more about this book, reviews, and excerpts here. (The original hardcover was published by the University of Utah Press and the still in-print paperback is available from Milkweed Editions and all the usual online and independent booksellers.)



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> Your comments are always very welcome. Write to me here.

Reading Mexico: Recommendations for a Book Club of 

Extra-Curious and Adventurous English-Language Readers

Biographers International Interview: 

A Strange Spark of the Mexican Revolution

On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises

(University of Texas El Paso Centennial Lecture)

Lord Kingsborough's ANTIQUITIES OF MEXICO

Mexico has been very much on my mind these past days because I have been working on some translations of works by Mexican writers Agustín Cadena and Rose Mary Salum... more news about those soon... and also (not entirely a digression from the book in-progress about Far West Texas) I have been working on an essay about books in Mexico entitled "Dispatch from the Sister Republic." A brief excerpt from that as yet unpublished essay:

>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

The Dresden Codex was water-damaged in the firebombings of World War II. Fortunately for us, around 1825, a facsimile had been made by the Italian artist Agostino Aglio, commissioned by the Irish peer Edward King, Lord Kingsborough—the latter a believer in the theory, to become an article of faith for the Mormons, that the Mesoamericans were descendants of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. 

archive.org

Aglio’s facsimile is included in Kingsborough’s colossal multi-volume Antiquities of Mexico. And when I say “colossal” I do not exaggerate. In those days before photography, Lord Kingsborough sent Aglio all over Europe, to the Vatican Library, the royal libraries of Berlin, Dresden, and Paris, and the Bodleian Library at Oxford, among many others, to copy their Mexican codices, painstakingly tracing the elaborate diagrams and glyphics, and then coloring them in. Aglio also made paintings of Mexican sculptures and other artifacts in European collections. The whole project, from making the fascimiles to the state-of-the-art color printing and luxury binding, was at once a visionary contribution to world culture and an extravagance beyond folly. It could be said that Antiquities of Mexico killed Lord Kingsborough; having exhausted his liquidity before paying for the paper, he was imprisoned in Dublin, where he contracted typhoid.*

archive.org

 Lord Kingsborough never made it to Mexico, but it was in Mexico City, on a tour of the Biblioteca Vasconcelos, that I saw one of those volumes of Antiquities of Mexico up close. That particular volume was part of the personal library, then recently acquired, of Carlos Monsiváis, one of Mexico’s most esteemed journalists and leftist social critics, who died in 2010. I could not tell you which volume of Antiquities of Mexico it was nor why nor how it was separated from its fellow volumes in its set, nor why nor how Monsiváis, famous for his witty musings on Mexican popular culture, had acquired it.

The librarian, wearing white gloves, strained to lift the volume off its shelf. Bound in navy-blue Morrocco leather, it was the size of a small suitcase. With the grimace of a weight-lifter, he slowly lowered it onto the table. He levered up the cover, then turned a couple of the pages. The colors of the prints of Aglio’s paintings of the leaves from a codex— red, yellow, turquoise, ochre— were as bright as if painted that morning. 

I later learned that that single volume weighed some 65 pounds.

*Sylvia D. Whitmore, "Lord Kingsborough and His Contribution to Ancient Mesoamerican Scholarship: The Antiquities of Mexico," The PARI Journal, Spring, 2009 



>> Read more about the Antiquities of Mexico at Dorothy Sloan-Rare Books, a description of a set that was auctioned for USD 61, 625.


>> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.



UPDATE: "Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla," my long essay on the Mexican literary landscape and the power of the book, is now available in Kindle.

amazon.com

Reading Mexico: Recommendations for an English-Language Book Club

Una ventana al mundo invisible (A Window to the Invisible World):

Master Amajur and the Smoking Signatures

Biographers International Interview: A Strange Spark of the Mexican Revolution