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Showing posts with label Literal magazine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literal magazine. Show all posts
Sunday, December 20, 2020
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
In Plain Sight: Felix Sommerfeld, Spymaster in Mexico, 1908 to 1914 by Heribert von Feilitzsch
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| [amazon] |
My review, just published in Literal:
IN PLAIN SIGHT: FELIX A. SOMMERFELD, SPYMASTER IN MEXICO, 1908 to 1914
by Heribert von Feilitzsch
Henselstone Verlag, 2012
It was Mahatma Gandhi who said, "A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history." Like Gandhi, Francisco I. Madero was deeply influenced by the Hindu scripture known as the Bhagavad-Gita and its concern with the metaphysics of faith and duty. And like Gandhi, Madero altered the course of history of his nation. From 1908, with his call for effective suffrage and no reelection, until his assasination in 1913, Madero received the support of not all, certainly, but many millions of Mexicans from all classes of society and all regions of the republic. But the fact is, during the 1910 Revolution, during Madero's successful campaign for the presidency, and during Madero's presidency, one of the members of that "small body of determined spirits," who worked most closely with him was not Mexican. His name was Felix A. Sommerfeld and he was a German spy. >>> CONTINUE READING
Monday, June 06, 2016
Ax of Apocalypse: Strieber and Kripal's THE SUPER NATURAL: A NEW VISION OF THE UNEXPLAINED
Just posted in Literal Magazine, my review of Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal's THE SUPER NATURAL: A NEW VISION OF THE UNEXPLAINED. It's a crunchier review than my usual 500 - 1,000 words; I went into detail about my own encounter with a mystical text, Francisco I. Madero's Manual espírita of 1911, plus brief discussion of Jeffrey Mishlove's The PK Man.
This book is a flying ax of apocalypse. But whoa, let's first bring this identified flying thoughtform to Planet Earth: to Texas; Houston; Rice University; Department of Religion; and finally, the office of the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought, Jeffrey J. Kripal.
Professor Kripal, who describes his work as comparing "fantastic states of mind and energy and their symbolic expressions in human history, literature, religion, and art," is one of two authors, alternating chapters, who have launched this catch-it-if-you-can metaphysical ax. The other is Whitley Strieber, a Texan internationally famous for his horror fiction and series of memoirs beginning with Communion: A True Story, the 1987 best-seller about his encounters with UFOs and entities he calls "the visitors." Whether you indulge in Strieber's shiver-worthy writings or not, you've no doubt seen the image of a "visitor" from the cover of Communion everywhere from the movies to cartoons: a bulbous rubber-like head with darkly liquid almond-shaped eyes.
If you've read this far and are tempted to stop, I urge you to take a breath—a bold breath. Should you still feel bristling hostility, as many educated readers do at the mere mention of such subjects as UFOs and "the visitors," that's normal. Soldier through the discomfort, however, and you may be able to open a door from the comfy cell of mechanistic materialism onto vast, if vertiginous vistas of reality itself—and not to the supernatural but, as Kripal and Streiber would have it, the super natural.
That door does not open with a key but with what Kripal terms a cut—as provided by Immanuel Kant, that most emminent of bewigged German philosophers. More about the "Kantian cut" in a moment.
Never mind the remarkable contents of The Super Natural, the fact that two such authors would write a book together is remarkable in the extreme. Strieber, while building a passionate following for Communion, his many other works and esoteric podcast, "Dreamland," has also attracted widespread ridicule for his memoirs which go beyond retailing his perceptions of his abductions by "the visitors" to adventures, both in and out of body, with orbs, hair-raising magnetic fields, blue frog-faced trolls, and the dead. Nonetheless, Kripal, as one steeped in the literature of the world's religions, identifies Strieber's Communion as "a piece of modern erotic mystical literature," and indeed, nothing less than a litmus test for his own academic field:
>> CONTINUE READING on Literal Magazine
Your comments are ever and always welcome.
Newsletter? Yep.
It might go out in July. Maybe again in September.
It will have news and new podcasts,
including from the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project
Selected Book Reviews by C.M. Mayo:
by Sam Quinones
by Edward H. Miller
by Lisa G. Sharp
By Frances Calderon de la Barca
&
Monday, October 12, 2015
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
By Sam Quinones
Reviewed by C.M. Mayo
This is a grenade of a book. Based on extensive investigative reporting on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Sam Quinones’ Dreamland tells the deeply unsettling story of the production, smuggling, and marketing of semi-processed opium base— or “black tar heroin”— originating in and around Xalisco, a farm town in the state of Nayarit, and in tandem, the story of the aggressive marketing of pain pills in the U.S.— in particular, of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin—and the resulting conflagration of addiction and death.
Unlike previous drug epidemics—heroin in the 70s, crack in the 90s— this one involved more deaths and more users, and not so many in urban slums but “in communities where the driveways were clean, the cars were new, and the shopping centers attracted congregations of Starbucks, Home Depot, CVS, and Applebee’s.”
Mexican black tar heroin trafficking isn’t anything like what you’ve seen on TV or in the movies or, for that matter, most books about narcotrafficking. It’s a small-time and customer-centric business: smugglers carry small high-quality batches over the border, and then drivers, using codes received on their cell phones, deliver tiny balloons filled with heroin directly to individual customers. The smugglers and drivers, “Xalisco Boys,” for the most part— friends, neighbors, brothers, third cousins— are not ready-for-prime-time “narcos” but otherwise ordinary young men from an otherwise ordinary farm town.
Nor are these Mexicans crossing the border because they are drawn by the light of “a better life” in the U.S. Their goal is a short period of hard work—and if that work happens to be delivering balloons filled with some drug to gringo addicts, so be it—and then to return home with the cash to peel off for a house, a wedding banquet with a live band, a stack of Levi’s jeans for the clan.
The number of English language reporters who could have written such a book can be counted on one hand— if that. Quinones draws on two decades of covering remote corners of Mexico and Mexican immigrants to the U.S. His two previous books, both superb, are True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx and Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. In Dreamland, Quinones writes about the “Xalisco Boys” with unusual insight and compassion [CONTINUE READING]
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
A Conversation with Mexican Writer Rose Mary Salum About Making Connections with Literature and Art
So far the series features conversations with:
Sergio Troncoso on writing his latest novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust; Chicano literature; the US-Mexico border; on writing for New York; reading; blogging; and 9/11.
Michael K. Schuessler on Mexico's incomparable poet Guadalupe (Pita) Amor; her neice, Mexico's acclaimed novelist and journalist Elena Poniatowska; the baroque literary prodigy Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; and the great friend of Mexico, the adventurous and passionate journalist Alma Reed, whose autobiography—a work vital to early 20th century Yucatecan history— Schuessler rescued from an abandoned closet.
Edward Swift on his memoir My Grandfather's Finger and recent novel, The Daughter of the Doctor and the Saint, plus his Orphic journey to Texas's Big Thicket, Marguerite Young, Proust, Greenwich Village, and the wonders of Mexico's little-known Sierra Gorda.
Sara Mansfield Taber, author of Born Under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy's Daughter, on her father's work in Asia, including his daring rescue of over a thousand Vietnamese after the fall of Vietnam to the Vietcong, and his disenchantment with the agency while working in Germany; Taber's childhood in Taiwan, highschool years in Washington DC during the Vietnam War; her previous books, including Bread of Three Rivers and Dusk on the Campo; other travel writers, reading as a writer; writing practice, and teaching writing.
Solveig Eggerz on her poetic novel Seal Woman, her unusual background (from Iceland to England to Germany to Alexandria, Virginia), Iceland's book culture, fairytales, and advice for writers.
>> Read more about the Conversations with Other Writers occasional podcast series.
I call it an "occasional series" because, well, it's very occasional. Over the past couple of years I have not posted any other conversations because I was writing Metaphsyical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution (now out in paperback, ebook, and also in Spanish), and I am once again focussing on the Marfa Mondays Podcasts (16 so far of a projected 24). But I so love to do these interviews with my fellow writers, and I hope you will relish and learn from them as much as I have. Gracias, dear Rose Mary. Thank you, all.
Wednesday, June 04, 2014
New Vessel Press: Read Your Way Around the World
As a literary translator and long-ago editor of the now-defunct Tameme, I sat up and took serious notice of this beautiful new effort out of New York: New Vessel Press. Warmest wishes to you! Dear readers, do check this out.
COMMENTS always welcome
More anon. I have been in IngramSpark purgatory all day long. Grrr.
SURF ON:
>Around the World with Madam Mayo: Summer Travel Reading
>Celebrating Literal: My Talk from the Feria Internacional de Libros
>Largehearted Boy Playlist
>Why Aren't There More Readers?
COMMENTS always welcome
More anon. I have been in IngramSpark purgatory all day long. Grrr.
SURF ON:
>Around the World with Madam Mayo: Summer Travel Reading
>Celebrating Literal: My Talk from the Feria Internacional de Libros
>Largehearted Boy Playlist
>Why Aren't There More Readers?
Monday, April 28, 2014
Literally Short Film Awards
For its 10th anniversary, Literal Magazine is holding a short film contest.
I am a big, big fan of Literal. Having edited my own literary magazine, Tameme, for a mere 3 issues, I stand in awe of all that editor Rose Mary Salum and her team have accomplished-- and continue to accomplish. I'll be posting a note soon about the latest anthology, a beautiful and path-breaking collection of Arab and Jewish short stories out of Latin America, Delta de las arenas.
PS Check out my latest book reviews in Literal:
*Making a New World and Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States by John Tutino
*Our Lost Border, edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso
*From This Wicked Patch of Dust and Crossing Borders by Sergio Troncoso
And an article, now ancient history: "Twitter Is"
I am a big, big fan of Literal. Having edited my own literary magazine, Tameme, for a mere 3 issues, I stand in awe of all that editor Rose Mary Salum and her team have accomplished-- and continue to accomplish. I'll be posting a note soon about the latest anthology, a beautiful and path-breaking collection of Arab and Jewish short stories out of Latin America, Delta de las arenas.
PS Check out my latest book reviews in Literal:
*Making a New World and Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States by John Tutino
*Our Lost Border, edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso
*From This Wicked Patch of Dust and Crossing Borders by Sergio Troncoso
And an article, now ancient history: "Twitter Is"
Monday, December 17, 2012
Sergio Troncoso's From This Wicked Patch of Earth and Crossing Borders
¡¡Viva!!
Read my review of these two books for Literal Magazine.
Listen in to my conversation with Sergio about these two books on the Conversations with Other Writers podcasting series:
--> LISTEN NOW
Monday, May 14, 2012
Sergio Troncoso's From This Wicked Patch of Dust and Cross Borders: Personal Essays
(Arte Público Press, 2011)
(University of Arizona Press, 2011)
Este maldito terregal, this wicked patch of dust, is what SergioTronoco’s mother called Ysleta, their barrio in El Paso, Texas, and from this he takes the titles of his new novel and an essay which is included in the collection, Crossing Borders, both published in 2011.
Ranging from several lengthy and intimately personal essays about family, to lessons in literary politics, to a passel of posts from his blog, Chico Lingo, Crossing Borders provides a rich introduction to not only Tronoco’s new novel, but also his previous work, which includes the novel The Nature of Truth (Northwestern University Press, 2003), and the short story collection, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories (University of Arizona Press, 1999), which won the Premio Aztlán for the best new book by a new Mexican-American writer.
Troncoso’s work, by his own admission, is not easy. In “Literature and Migration,” he states his position plainly:“Against much of popular American fiction, my stories are not primarily to entertain the reader, but to unmoor him. I want the reader to face through my characters perhaps what he will not face himself.”
Though born the son of Mexican immigrants in a hardscrabble border barrio, and brought up Catholic, he was educated at Harvard and Yale and went on to marry a Jewish classmate who has since made a successful career in banking. Today they and their two boys, Aaron and Isaac, live in a doorman building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a world as exotic to Ysleta and Ysleta is to it. If the role of the writer is, as Tronoco argues, to be an outsider, his perch is priviledged indeed, for it has not always been easy to find his way in the northeast, nor, for all his experiences and Ivy League education, to revisit his childhood home. “On good days I feel I am a bridge,” writes Troncoso. “On bad days I just feel alone.”
There were some bad days during his tenure on the board of the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, which he recounts in the essay “Apostate of my Literary Family.” Not to be confused with the unrelated Bethesda, Maryland-based Writer’s Center, the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center is a short train ride from Manhattan into the tony Westchester subsurbs. Initially, Troncoso felt disrespected and treated as token Latino. He tired of “having to endlessly explain issues of literature to those who were not writers, [and] justifying the importance of Latino writers to those who did not read much literature (Latino or otherwise).” But in the end, he learned a valuable lesson: “whether, and when, to submlimate or redirect instinctual personal reactions into socially acceptable points of view and arguments. Perhaps this is a function of any family, to convert its members into socially funcional human beings.”
Family is the subject of most of the other essays, which include a trio of letters to his sons about their mother Laura’s terrifying and brutal struggle with breast cancer. Though clearly set in turn- of- the-21st century Manhattan, there is a timelessness to the story. The reader can imagine the two boys, once grown, and again, when they too have young children, and then again, decades later when their parents are elderly or perhaps no longer living, reading and rereading, mining ever richer veins of meaning in these heartfelt letters from their father. Laura survives and her husband writes, “We have more days and do not waste them. We do posses an eternal wound in a way, a wound that reminds us of the rarity and fragility of life. Our quotidian fantasy is now a new quotidian reality: vividly colorful days, days of curiosity, days bereft of many useless fears and petty ambitions, these days of wonder.”
The magnet of family flung into in a cultural, economic, political, religious, and geographic centrifuge is the focus of the novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust, which opens with Mexican immigrant Pilar and her husband Cuauhtémoc’s travails in building a house in the as-yet-unwired desert barrio of Ysleta in the summer of 1966. A dozen years later, their daughter Julia, a UTEP undergrad, is traveling through Italy, having spent the summer as a Spanish translator for the Sisters of Perpetual Charity. Meanwhile, in Ysleta, her parents listen to their old friend Carlos play Mexican love songs on the guitar, while the kids escape to another room to watch Charlie’s Angels. The centrifuge accelerates. Ismael, class valedictorian, earns a scholarship to the Blair Summer School for Journalism in New Jersey, while Julia, with a group from the Mexican-American Cultural Center, has traveled to Nicaragua, and taken a sharp turn to the left into liberation theology. “Mamá y Papá,” Julia writes, “do not be surprised if this letter has been read by someone in the post office in Ysleta or even by the FBI or CIA.”
Ismael goes to Harvard and finds a Jewish bride; Julia to Minnesota and a conversion to Islam. In late 2011, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Ismael is in New York when his sister, now married and living in Tehran, calls to see how he is. Their conversation is so well-grounded in knowing detail that Troncoso makes what might seem fantastic, a brother and sister so far from Ysleta and so impossibly far from one another, both believable and moving.
Five years later, after the loss of a beloved brother who was serving in Iraq, Ismael, a writer now, presents their mother with a story, a narrative Ouroboros. “It’s about Ysleta. It’s about how we lived, how we tried. It’s about how we were together for a time.”
In the final essay in his collection, “Why Should Latinos Write Their Own Stories?” Tronocoso answers, “to define ourselves,” and “to challenge ourselves.” In his novel, he has done this brilliantly.
-- C.M. Mayo
--Reprinted by permission of Literal Magazine. All rights reserved.
---> Read more of my book reviews here.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Sergio Troncoso Writing in Literal on the Loss of Ciudad Juárez
Wednesdays is the usual day for a guest-blog post here at Madam Mayo, but today I'd like to send you elsewhere-- to read Sergio Troncoso's haunting and important essay for Literal Magazine about the loss of Ciudad Juárez.
The Loss of Juárez: How Has the Violence in Juárez Changed Border Culture?
by Sergio Troncoso
Recently I returned home to El Paso, and as we drove back to Ysleta on the Border Highway a sense of sadness overtook me. My kids, Aaron and Isaac, have for two years been clamoring to go to Mexico. They have studied Spanish in New York City, where we live, and their classroom walls are covered with posters from Latin America and Spain. When we return to Ysleta to visit their abuelitos, that is the opportunity to transform the Spanish language and Mexico to more than just academic subjects, to eat an enchilada or an asadero, rather than just to lick your lips at pictures. . . . CONTINUE READING
Saturday, April 10, 2010
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