Lonn Taylor (1940-2019) and Don Graham (1940-2019), Giants Among Texas Literati

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

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. 

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MARFA FOR THE PERPLEXED by Lonn Taylor, illustrated by Avram Dumitrescu

Get your copy from
The Marfa Book Company

If you have any interest in Marfa, grab this book, and if you have never heard of Marfa, grab this book and you will be fascinated! I have yet to grab it myself, for it is hot off the presses from the Marfa Book Company, but I have already read most of it, as I have been an avid and long-time reader of historian Lonn Taylor's "Rambling Boy" columns, many about Marfa and its denizens, for the Big Bend Sentinel.

> Taylor also reads his columns for NPR here.

Taylor is a deeply knowledgable historian-- he made a distinguished career at the Smithsonian Institution before retiring to Far West Texas-- and a most elegant writer, ever curious and clear-eyed, and one--how rare this is!-- with a gentlemanly heart bigger than the world.

As for artist Avram Dumitrescu, two of his wild-eyed chicken paintings, red-white-and-blue like the Lone Star State's flag, are hanging on the wall in my Texas Bibliothek, exuding their magic "dino energy"! Viva!

From the catalog copy:

Marfa for the Perplexed, by Lonn Taylor, is a collection of 60 essays about people and places in and around Marfa, Texas. Due to the work there of the minimalist artist Donald Judd between 1972 and his death in 1994, Marfa (population 2,000), located 200 miles from the nearest commercial airport in Texas’s isolated Big Bend region, has become an international art center and, more recently, a hip tourist destination. Marfa for the Perplexed reveals that Marfa and the surrounding country has always been a place of refuge for eccentrics and individualists, many of whom you will meet in the book’s pages. It exposes the rich mix of cultures that underlies the current Marfa art scene - the real Marfa beyond the buzz.

Marfa for the Perplexed is illustrated by Alpine, Texas artist Avram Dumitrescu. The foreword is by Marfa’s Sterry Butcher, a frequent contributor to Texas Monthly and other publications. 

I am proud to say that Taylor and Dumitrescu both granted me interviews (Taylor here, in 2015, and Dumitrescu here in 2012) for my Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project, which is apropos of my book in-progress-- despite the title of the podcast series, my book covers not only Marfa but the wider Big Bend / Trans-Pecos region, that is to say, Far West Texas.

> Lonn Taylor and Avram Dumitrescu talk about their book for Marfa Public Radio

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

Lonn Taylor's Texas People, Texas Places

Patrick Dearen's Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River

Waaaay Out to the Big Bend of Far West Texas

Two New "Marfa Mondays" Podcast Transcripts: "Charles Angell in the Big Bend" and "Mary Bones on the Lost Art Colony"

You can listen in to all my podcasts anytime, but I know some of you read at a faster clip than you can listen, so I've been posting the transcripts bit by bit. As of last night, new on the website are two more transcripts of Marfa Mondays podcast interviews, both of which provide excellent introduction to the topic at hand, adventure in the Big Bend and the "lost colony"-- of artists who came to this spectacularly scenic region well before Donald Judd.

Marfa Mondays #2 Charles Angell in the Big Bend

"I just love to be in the river. It's like the best seat in the house for the Big Bend, I think. You can see canyon walls. You see desert. You see riparian zones. There's more wildlife there than anywhere else, and even if it's a really, really hot summer day, you can stay cool." [READ MORE]

Listen now




Marfa Mondays #3 Mary Bones on the Lost Art Colony

"Julius Woeltz is my favorite... He was really known as a fine muralist. I think he painted well over 30 murals in his lifetime. He very much was influenced by Rivera and Orozco. He and his very good friend, Xavier González, spent many summers down in Mexico and Mexico City looking at the muralists..." [READ MORE]

Listen now


There will be more Marfa Mondays podcasts until there are 24. The latest, #17, is Under Sleeping Lion: Lonn Taylor in Fort Davis

Your comments are always welcome.

Indian Head in Terlingua

"La Chora Interminable" Goes to Marfa

Cyberflanerie: Solitario Dome Edition

Book Review: Desert America

Marfa Mondays Podcast #17 Under Sleeping Lion: Lonn Taylor in Fort Davis

From the "secret historians" to the Propeller Man to the Filippino restaurant: you'll learn about a myriad unexpected people and stories of the Big Bend and Marfa, Texas in my interview with historian Lonn Taylor, the "Rambling Boy" columnist for the Big Bend Sentinel. Recorded in Fort Davis in March 2015.

> Listen in anytime right here.

> Read the transcript

"Everybody kind of has a stereotype of Marfa either as the cattle town where they filmed “Giant” or a contemporary art center. I like discovering things that don’t fit into that stereotype. "                                                                --Lonn Taylor

> Marfa Mondays home page with all 17 podcasts (of a projected 24)

> Your COMMENTS are always welcome, and you are also most welcome to sign up for my newsletter which goes out every other month-ish.

Mary S. Black interviews Yrs Truly about the Marfa Mondays Project

Marfa Mondays Blog

Casa Piedra Rd (C.M. Mayo's video, 1 minute)

Book Review: Richard Parker's Lone Star Nation

Cyberflanerie: Solitario Dome Edition

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Inside The Solitario
Photo: C.M. Mayo
March 2015

For my Far West Texas book-in-progress and the Marfa Mondays Podcasting project, I am working on an interview with Texas historian Lonn Taylor, plus a short piece about the Solitario Dome of Big Bend Ranch State Park in Far West Texas, which is to say, US-Mexico border country. 

Meanwhile, a few links about the latter:
Chase Snodgrass's flight over the Solitario:

Flora and Vegetation of the Solitario Dome
by Jean Evans Hardy, Iron Mountain Press, 2009
(Whoa, call the chiropracter, I brought this one home in my carry-on.)

Geology of the Solitario
by Charles E. Corry, et al. Geological Society of America Special Paper 250, 1990.

"Igneous Evolution of a Complex Laccolith-Caldera, the Solitario, Trans-Pecos, Texas:
Implications for Calderas and Subjacent Plutons" 
by Christopher D. Henry, et al. Geological Society of America Bulletin, August 1997
(Super-crunchy PDF)

Google Maps screenshot

"The Solitario: Sentinel of the Big Bend Ranch State Park"
Megan Hicks, The Big Bend Paisano, Winter 2004/2005
(PDF)

"Geology at the Crossroads"
By Blaine R. Hall, Big Bend Ranch State Park
(PDF)


"Solitario: A Separate Place" and "Fresno Creek:" Desert Cloister" Texas Monthly, April 1977

Entering the labyrinth of the Solitario via Los Portales
(That's my guide, Charlie Angell, he's the best,
check him out on Tripadvisor.com)
Photo: C.M. Mayo, March 2015

>Your COMMENTS are always welcome.

>Listen in to all the Marfa Mondays Podcasts anytime. The most recent is "Tremendous Forms: Finding Composition in the Landscape," an interview with Paul V. Chaplo, author of the magnificent Marfa Flights.

> Marfa Mondays #2 Charles Angell in the Big Bend

Lonn Taylor's Texas People, Texas Places

Ever since I first came upon Lonn Taylor's column for the Big Bend Sentinel, "The Rambling Boy," I've been a big fan. I devoured his collection of columns, Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy— and added it to my list of top 10 books read in 2012. My mini-review:

"[T]his is far from the usual mashed potatoes newspaper fare.  Taylor is a wise and lyrical writer with a background as a professional historian and his mammoth love for Texas is infectious. This is a book to savor in a rocking chair on a hot day with a tall glass of spiked lemonade at your side. Get ready to howl with the one about the in-law aunts's oodles of poodles."

And lo, out of the blue (I don't think he knew I'd blogged about his book), Taylor writes to me that he wants to do a column about Agustín de Iturbide y Green, an historical figure he had known about since his days in Washington DC— having found me via my webpage for my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. I was happy to supply what I'd gleaned from my research, which included what I dug out of the archives in Iturbide y Green's personal archive in Catholic University, another archive in Georgetown University, the Iturbide collections in the Library of Congress, the Historical Society of Washington DC, and —whew, yeah, I did a heap of research— Mexico City and Vienna (more about all that here). I can count on one hand, with plenty of fingers leftover, the number of people who had even the basic outline of the story of Agustin de Iturbide y Green straight before I did; the published literature on Mexico's Second Empire is full of bizarre misunderstandings and mistakes and even some of his own family members in Mexico had some very strange ideas (for example, that Iturbide y Green had never married, but in fact, he had, in Washington DC in 1915, and happily, until his death in 1925). So! Now! Read Lonn Taylor's column, "The Royal Family of Mexico."

More Lonn Taylor news: his latest collection is Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy, and I loved this one just as much as the first— I devoured it, chuckling over every other page. Just to give an idea, this is the sort of thing that kept me laughing out loud— from "The Jacksons of Blue and Other Texas Chairmakers":

"... most respectable people considered chairmakers somewhat marginal and looked down on them as not being totally respectable. This attitude probably originated in England, where chairmakers lived in the woods, close to their close materials, and did not farm or mix much with ordinary folk. In England chairmakers are called bodgers. Folklorist Geriant Jenkins once asked an informant where the word came from, and the answer was, "Because they be always bodgin' about in the woods."

Of special interest for me, since I am work on a book about Far West Texas, was his column "Albert Alvarez, Secret Historian," about a Mexican-American of Pecos, Texas. In Mexico, where every city and town seems to have one, Alvarez would be addressed with great respect as El crónista. In Texas as it is, alas, Spanish speaking historians and their contributions to Texas history remain marginalized. And that's something I'll be writing about, too.

More anon.

COMMENTS?


SURF ON
Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project
Marfa Mondays Blog
John Bankhead Magruder: A Military Reappraisal by Thomas M. Settles
Top 10 Books Read 2013

Cyberflanerie: The Voynich Manuscript, Books, Used Books, Rare Books, and the Future of Bookstores Edition

Totally huge news: The mysterious circa 15th or 16th century Voynich manusucript might be of Mexican origin: Arthur O. Tucker and Rexford H. Talbert make a very interesting case in, of all places, HerbalGram, the Journal of the American Botanical Council, issue 100, 2013, in their article "A Preliminary Analysis of the Botany, Zoology, and Minerology of the Voynich Manuscript." Could the strange, supposedly cipher, language have been simply a dialect of Nahuatl?

To see the Voynich manuscript on-line, check it out at the website of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. 

Sam Quinones, a most original and intrepid journalist, who hosts the Tell Your True Tale website, has just brought out the Tell Your True Tale: East Los Angeles, in both paperback and Kindle.

Novelist and blogger Carmen Amato has asked Yours Truly and other "influential bloggers" to pontificate on the Future of Bookstores. (For some visuals, try this.)

The Rambling Boy of the Big Bend Sentinel, Lonn Taylor, goes browsing for bargains at used bookstores.

Find books with Bibliopolis.

Here's a cool new venue for selling books: Gumroad. Stay tuned on that front.

More anon.

Cyberflanerie: Pie and More Good Things Edition

PRINT ALL OVER ME

Lonn Taylor, aka The Rambling Boy on pie (and how to tell thems Yankees).

My DC writer amiga Judy Leaver is Thankful for the Synchronicity of Good Things.

Poet, writer and translator Pat Dubrava just keeps falling in love with people.

For my next foray across Wyoming, I totally want this dinosaur fossil sweatshirt, available from Print All Over Me (hat tip to swissmiss). (This is along the lines of Spoonflower-- and by the way, for some curtains, I ordered some fabric with artist Kathryn Dunn's designs. PS Make and sell your own designs.)

If I had a little writing hut in the forest, this flooring could definitely work...

PRINT ALL OVER ME

Not for me, but maybe you know someone who needs an inflatable unicorn head. Just sayin.

3D Printed salsa-dancing spider!

And Ten Pound Island has just issued a new catalog of rare books about world travels, "Get Me Out of Here!" (PDF).

More anon.

(Wrapped up in production issues this week. My book, Metaphysical Odyssey Into the Mexican Revolution, is now available in Kindle; the paperback has a been a bit delayed but should be available before the end of this year. The Spanish edition, Odisea metafísica hacia la Revolución Mexicana, translated (I am delighted and honored to say) by the amazing Agustín Cadena, will be available from Editorial Espejo de Obsidiana early in 2014, and in Kindle as well. Then back to the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project...)

COMMENTS