Top 10 for the Cinco de Mayo

In commemoration of the Battle of Puebla, herewith the top 10 links to Mexico-related content from Yours Truly:

1. 

Looking at Mexico in New Ways: An Interview with Historian John Tutino

For the Marfa Mondays Podcasting project

(Podcast and transcript)

2. 

Raymond Caballero on Mexican Revolutionary General Pascual Orozco and Far West Texas

For the Marfa Mondays Podcast Project

(Podcast and transcript)

3. 

The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, my novel based on the deeply researched true story of Agustín de Iturbide y Green. It was published on Cinco de Mayo back in (whew) 2009, and was named a Library Journal Best Book of that year. It's also available in Spanish, beautifully translated by Agustín Cadena as El último príncipe del Imperio Mexicano. 

> Q & A (numerous interviews plus a Reader's Guide)

> My lecture for the Library of Congress Hispanic Division

> PEN Writers Aloud San Miguel de Allende, Mexico (podcast)

> Review by Pablo Soler Frost for Letras Libres

4. 

Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico

> Excerpts

> Photo album

> Rolf Potts interviews me about this book for Vagabonding

5.

My 2015 Centennial Lecture for the University of Texas El Paso, 

"On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises"
Mexico's half-American prince, Jesuits in Lower California, and the secret book by the leader of Mexico' 1910 revolution.

6. 

Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. This is my translation and introduction to the secret book by Francisco I. Madero, leader of the 1910 Revolution and

President of Mexico from 1911-1913. Also available in Spanish, my introduction beautifully translated by Agustín Cadena as Odisea metafísica hacia la Revolución Mexicana.

> Why Translate? The Case of the President of Mexico's Secret Book (My talk for the American Literary Translators Conference 2014)

> Jeffrey Mishlove's interview with me about this book for "New Thinking Allowed" TV show

> Greg Kaminsky's interview with me about this book for the "Occult of Personality" podcast

> Review by José Mariano Leyva for Letras Libres

7.

Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion

My anthology of 24 Mexican writers, many in translation for the first time.

> Read the introduction by Yours Truly

> Read a short story story by Agustín Cadena

> John Yside's interview with me about literary translation for National Public Radio 

8.  

Three super crunchy podcasts focusing on Mexico from my Conversations with Other Writers series:

A Conversation with Biographer Michael K. Schuessler on Pita Amor, Elena Poniatowska, Sor Juana and Alma Reed

A Conversation with Historian M. M. McAllen on Maximilian and Carlota

A Conversation with Mexican Writer, Poet and Editor Rose Mary Salum

On Making Connections with Literature and Art

9. 
Three blog posts about visits to unusual sites in Mexico

A Visit to the ex-Hacienda de Chautla
(From the Maximilian and Carlota research blog)

A Visit to Las Pozas, Xilita
(From this blog, Madam Mayo)

Junípero Serra in the Sierra Gorda
(Also from this blog, Madam Mayo)

10. 

My Recollections of Maximilian by Marie de la Fere

A rare English language eyewitness memoir of Maximilian from the Bancroft Library. Edited and introduced by Yours Truly. On the website you can read the chapbook either on the page or as a free formatted PDF download.

Your comments are always welcome.

CLICK HERE.

I also invite you to sign up for my newsletter

which I might get around to sending it out in June. 

It will have podcasts. 

REGISTER HERE.

Notes on Xavier González, "Moonlight Over the Chisos" 

and a Visit to Mexico City's Antigua Academia de San Carlos

Dreamland by Sam Quinones (review for Literal)

Rosemary Sullivan: A Traveler in Mexico (podcast)

For Mexicophiles: Recommended Reading

New Transcript for the Podcast "A Conversation with Michael K. Schuessler About Pita Amor, Elena Poniatowska, Sor Juana, and "La Peregrina," Alma Reed

Michael K. Schuessler is one of the most knowledgable, dedicated and prolific scholars of the Mexican art and literary history. His fascinating and very fun podcast interview, for my occasional series, Conversations with Other Writers, recorded and posted back in 2012, now has a complete transcript.  

> As always, you can listen in to this podcast anytime for free on iTunes and Podomatic.

> Check out more Conversations with Other Writers, among them,  Sergio Troncoso, Rose Mary Salum, Edward Swift, Sara Mansfield Taber and Solveig Eggerz. How often do these come out? Oh, la de da, when the planets align and the spirits move me. (That's why I call it "an occasional series." These days my focus is on the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project and my book in-progress on Far West Texas.) But for maybe this fall... I have another Conversations with Other Writers podcast interview in mind... a crunchily crunchy one... If you'd like to be alerted when any new podcast is posted, I invite you to sign up for my free newsletter which goes out every other month-ish.

I am this close to posting #18, my latest Marfa Mondays Podcast, a very fun and informative interview with a barrel racer at the West of the Pecos Rodeo in Pecos, Texas; in fact, I'd hoped to have it ready this afternoon. But I still need to edit my introduction and sign-off. Stay tuned for this one this Wednesday.

UPDATE: Just posted: Marfa Mondays Podcast #18: Lisa Fernandes, Barrel Racer at the Pecos Rodeo

Celebrating Literary Friends: Leslie Pietrzyk, 

Michael K. Schuessler, Rose Mary Salum, Araceli Ardon

A Podcast About Podcasting

Writing Loglines and the Concept of the "Eyespan"

Celebrating Literary Friends: Leslie Pietrzyk, Michael K. Schuessler, Rose Mary Salum, Araceli Ardón

My amiga and long-time fellow writing group member, Leslie Pietrzyk, has won the Drue Heinz award for short fiction, read all about it over on her blog, Work-in-Progress. Read also her powerful essay, must-reading for any and all aspiring writers, which she posted on her blog shortly before learning that she had won: "The Writing Life: What It Really Takes." 

Michael K. Schuessler, one of the writers writing on Mexico I most admire, has just brought out what is sure to be rollicking good read: Perdidos en la traducción: Cinco viajeros ilustres en México en el siglo XX. This one definitely needs to come out in English! A literal translation of the title would be Lost in Translation: Five Illustrious Travelers in 20th Century Mexico. Who are those travelers? Howard Hughes, William S. Burroughs, Marilyn Monroe, Edward James, and B. Traven. Here is a photo of me and my writing assistant, Uli Quetzalpugtl, celebrating with Michael at lunch in Mexico City day before yesterday. (What happened to my head? Uyy, seriously bad hair day.)

My writing assistant,
who never has bad hair days,
approves of this book.

And here is Michael showing me the spot where the Madero mansion stood. It was burned down by a mob in the Decena Trágica of 1913, as the little tile plaque explains.

P.S. Listen in to my podcast interview with Michael about his extraordinary biographies of Mexican novelist Elena Poniatowska and poet Pita Amor, and his surreal rescue of the memoir of "La Peregina," Alma Reed, international journalist and fiancée of Yucatan's radical governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto. 

More books by Mexico expert Michael K. Schuessler

Speaking of podcast interviews, I've been editing a wonderful one with Rose Mary Salum, editor of Literal. She's also a writer and the editor of the visionary anthology Delta de arenas, cuentos arabes, cuentos judíos. Stay tuned-- almost done! (Alas, what I needed was a Dead Kitten... that's the term for a muff around the microphone to filter out infelicitous noises. But ex post I am getting it all ironed out.)

Araceli Ardón has just brought out a gorgeous new book of paintings by Restituto Rodríguez, each paired with an original literary work-- including one by Yours Truly. More about this one in the next post-- and Ardón's gorgeous book on the Sierra Gorda.

Your COMMENTS are always welcome.

Visit to Las Pozas, Xilitla

A Conversation with Edward Swift

Top 10 Books Read 2014

Henry R. Magruder's Sketches of the Last Year of the Mexican Empire

Guestblogger Clara Rodriguez on 5 Latino Stars of Early Hollywood

Madero's Commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita

Cyberflanerie: Harry Ransom, Michael K. Schuessler, Tina Larkin, Sophy Burnham, Clay Shirky & more

Researchers and translators take note: The Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas has just made available a magnificent collection, with data base, of Spanish Theater and "Comedias Sueltas." Read more in English or in Spanish.

My amigo Michael K. Schuessler has just published a gorgeous and important book with University of Arizona Press: Foundational Arts: Mural Painting and Missionary Theater in New Spain. From the catalog:

In Foundational Arts Michael K. Schuessler asserts that the literature of New Spain begins with missionary theater and its intimate relationship to mural painting. In particular, he examines the relationships between texts and visual images that emerged in Mexico at two Augustinian monasteries in Hidalgo, Mexico, during the century following the Spanish Conquest. The forced combination of the ideographical tradition of Nahuatl with Latin-based language alphabets led to a fascinating array of new cultural expressions.
Missionary theater was organized by ingenious friars with the intent to convert and catechize indigenous populations. Often performed in Nahuatl or other local languages, the actors combined Latin-based language texts with visual contexts that corresponded to indigenous ways of knowing: murals, architectural ornamentation, statuary, altars, and other modes of visual representation. By concentrating on the interrelationship between mural painting and missionary theater, Foundational Arts explores the artistic and ideological origins of Mexican plastic arts and literature. 

Listen in to my interview with Michael Schuessler about his previous books about Mexico and Mexican writers, for Conversations with Other Writers. 

Paper Crown from Art We Heart
www.artweheart.com

Love-love-love these paper crowns from Art We Heart. Must, must, must have.

Oh, she seems so happy: Artist Tina Larkin and Purple HarpMobile.

Sophy Burnham's 10 Rules of the Universe.

Clay Shirky rants about women. (Having just nudged a couple of girlfriends with their unnecessarily modest CVs, I'd say he's right on. Anyway, a very interesting perspective, well worth reading and pondering.) 

Big Data blog by Igor Carron with a snow-cool title: Nuit Blanche.

Georgia O'Keeffe's hands: a brief and very unusual podcast by hand analyst Janet Savage.

Homicide Watch for Washington DC: a much needed and well-done blog. (So many murders, so little press.) 

Speaking of DC, Wilson Quarterly has launched as a digital.

Greg Borzo interviews me for the University of Chicago Social Sciences Division newsletter, about my new book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution. 

COMMENTS always welcome.

The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, by Anne-Marie O'Connor

The other day I participated on a panel -- this is the traditional Mexican format for such things-- presenting Anne Marie O'Connor's wonder of a new book, The Lady in Gold, at Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes. Fellow panelists were Irene Hemer, Alberto Hijar and Luz Maria Sanchez, and serving as moderator, my favorite biographer, Michael K. Schuessler. In the audience: (wow!) Elena Poniatowska.

Here's the English version of what I said in Spanish:

I don’t remember the first time I saw Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Probably, I was in highschool in California, probably I saw it in a book or as a postcard. It would have been titled, as the Austrians had retitled it during the Nazi period, Lady in Gold, with no further ado about its subject.

Of course I remembered the painting. Who could forget the Austrian Mona Lisa, stunning as a Byzantine icon, and that face – the face of belle époque Vienna—so elegantly intelligent, poised above a river of eyes of Horus?

My generation was born into a world where the adults had lived through World War II.  In 1941, my father was a little boy in the suburbs outside New York City and, as he told me many times, he was with my grandmother, as she was hanging up the laundry to dry, when the radio blared out the news of Pearl Harbor.

Veterans, survivors of POW camps, survivors of the Holocaust—these might be family, neighbors, a teacher, the owner of the shop on the corner. They were scattered everywhere, though these terrible times, the terrible things, were not subjects for everyday conversation. I never dared to ask my godfather, who was strangely calm, what he witnessed as a medic with General Patton in the Battle of the Bulge. I did not know until she was very elderly and had suffered a stroke, and I could no longer ask her about it, that my highschool French and German teacher, who had loved to sing "La Vie en Rose" on her guitar, had served as one of Herman Goering’s translators during the Nuremburg Trials.

For those of you young enough to not know, Hermann Goering was commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, the Third Reich’s Air Force, and Hitler’s designated successor. Condemned to death by hanging for his war crimes, in 1946, he committed suicide in his cell by taking cyanide.

So, though I was born 16 years after its end, as it has been for many of my generation in many countries, World War II was always very close, very vivid. But now that so many of its eyewitnesses have passed away, the vividness is moving from living memories to containers of memories, that is, to books.

Books: the capsules that carry the information, the stories of what it means to be human, across time and space. 

The literature on World War II, already almost unimaginably vast, continues to grow. Just to give you an inkling, my father, Roger Mansell, after retiring, dedicated some 20 years to amassing a library and data base on the POWs of the Japanese in the Pacific. Many of these horrific stories of torture and slave labor for Japanese corporations had been suppressed by the U.S. government and by the 90s, the Cold War over, many of the by then elderly survivors were avid to talk. The collection of books and documents and interviews took over his office, and then the house and the garage and I am quite sure my mother breathed a sigh of relief when Stanford University’s Hoover Institution accepted the donation of his archive. Since my father passed away in 2010, uncountable numbers of books have been published on the war in the Pacific, and his own, titled Captured: The Forgotten Men of Guam, will be published this fall by Naval Institute Press. The POWs of the Japanese in the Pacific was but one subspecialty: World War II touched almost every corner of the planet, including, of course, Mexico. And not to go on about my father’s very interesting and important research. Where I’m going with this is to say that in the ever-flowing Amazon-sized River of literature about World War II, its many theaters of action and its many genres and topics, Anne-Marie O’Connor’s The Lady in Gold, about the creation, theft, fight for, and return of an Austrian masterpiece, has a very special place. 

Not only does The Lady in Gold read like the best of novels, with polished prose and a well-structured narrative—richly delicious—  oh! I cannot resist the comparison—as a Viennese pastry— but it’s author, a seasoned journalist, dedicated many years to original and exhaustive research. Having spent some seven years researching my own book, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire or, El último príncipe del Imperio Mexicano, a novel based on the true story of Maximilian von Habsburg’s court, I know the tedium—and the joys—of fingering through archives, and mulling, sometimes over weeks, months and even years, puzzles, questions that themselves sometimes take eons to even formulate.

Know that when you hold Anne-Marie O’Connor’s book is your hand, you are holding a treasure. A treasure about a treasure. 

It might seem curious that we are here today in Mexico speaking in Spanish about a book written in English about an Austrian work of art. And yet, as every Mexican schoolchild knows, Mexico’s history intertwines with Austria’s. The French Intervention,  which installed the Austrian Archduke, Maximilian von Habsburg, as Emperor of Mexico, is the the elephant that lumbered through the middle of Mexico’s 19th century.

Gustav Klimt was born in 1862—the year the French were still battling for Puebla and Maximilian, in his castle in Trieste, recently removed from his position as commander of Austria’s navy—  and only 5 years from his death in Mexico— looked out over the gray Adriatic and mulled over his mysterious future. 

The Vienna of Klimt, of Adele Bloch-Bauer and her family, the cosmopolitan, highly cultured Vienna that would be a shadow of itself after World War I: This would have been the Vienna of Maximilian, had he lived.

Maximilian was born in 1832 in Schonbrunn Palace, Vienna—next to the Café Tivoli, where, but a few decades later, Gustav Klimt would take his daily breakfast before heading off to paint in his studio. Maximilian would have been 30 years old when Gustav Klimt appeared in this world, into his Vienna. Habsburg Vienna. Let us keep this simple fact in the forefront: 

It was Maximilian’s older brother, Franz Joseph, who ruled the empire from 1848 until his death as a very old man on the eve of World War I 

O’Connor evokes the old Vienna in so many ways… For example, her description of Adele Bauer-Bloch’s heir, the elderly Maria Altmann, as she appeared on television only a few years ago:
p. 236 

“She spoke the poetic, Italian German of the Habsburg empire, with flourishes, courtesies, and the instinctive impulse—even in open conflict—to be charming. It was like a magic spell, this lilting, delicate dialect, and it was all but extinct now.” 

It is not hard to imagine Maximilian, by his brother’s side, as Franz Joseph awarded the young Gustav Klimt the Golden Service Cross. I can imagine Maximilian admiring Klimt’s early murals for the Empress Elisabeth’s Hermes Palace—for the Empress Elisabeth, or Sisi, was not only Maximilian’s sister-in-law, she was Maximilian’s friend. Shortly before sailing to Mexico, Maximilian had escorted Sisi on a cruise to Corfu.

Maximilian loved art and music, he spoke many languages, traveled afar—Egypt, Portugal, and to his Habsburg cousin's empire, Brazil. He relied on an entourage almost as eclectic as the Habsburg empire itself, and famously, his last doctor, Samuel Basch, and one of his closest advisors, Baron Stefan von Herzfeld, were Jewish.

Had he lived, I think Maximilian would been charmed by – and perhaps even championed Klimt’s work, and, at the age of 76, brilliantly white-bearded and perhaps leaning a little on his cane, gazed upon The Portrait of Adele Bauer-Bloch, as I do, with genuine wonder, genuine admiration. 

My one and only criticism of Anne Marie O’Connor’s The Lady in Gold, which is really more an expression of admiration and enthusiasm, is that it is not already available in Spanish.

--Read in Spanish, Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, September 18, 2012

A Conversation with Sergio Troncoso, Author of From This Wicked Patch of Dust

A new and, of course, free, podcast in the Conversations with Other Writers series:

A conversation with Sergio Troncoso on Chicano literature, the book ban in Arizona, the US-Mexico border, 911, writing for New York, blogging, the culture of reading, and much more.

>>Read my review of Troncoso's From This Wicked Patch of Dust and Crossing Borders: Personal Essays for Literal Magazine, reproduced by permission here.

>>About the Conversations with Other Writers podcast series

>>Listen in anytime to previous conversations with:
Michael K. Schuessler
Edward Swift
Sara Mansfield Taber
Solveig Eggerz

>>So what's up with the monthly Marfa Mondays podcasts? Just slightly delayed due to unexpected developments... two more, for August and September 2012, will be very posted soon. Stay tuned on the home page. Ditto the iBookstore interactive ebook, Podcasting for Writers.

Michael Wiese Productions Podcasts (Recommended for Writers)

I just happened upon some helpful podcasts for filmmakers, screenwriters, and just plain ol' writers at Michael Wiese Productions on "BlogTalk Radio":
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/michaelwieseproductions

Michael Wiese publishes some excellent books. Apropos of a note on log lines, I recently posted a mini-rave review of one of them: Blake Snyder's Save the Cat!

I'm on the lookout for good podcasts  by and for writers, so let me know of any you recommend. I like to listen to them, but I'm also looking for helpful links to list in my forthcoming iBook, Podcasting for Writers. 


(My own latest podcasts include "Marfa Mondays" interviews with bee expert Cynthia McAlister; Avram Dumitrescu, a talented painter originally from Belfast; Museum of the Big Bend curator Mary Bones on the Big Bend's Lost Art Colony; and Charles Angell, expert wilderness guide and travel writer. Plus, several in the Conversations with Other Writers series, mostly recently, Elena Poniatowska's biographer, Michael K. Schuessler and travel writer and memoirist Sara Mansfield Taber.)

A Conversation with Michael K. Schuessler, on Pita Amor, Elena Poniatowska, Sor Juana, and the rescue of Alma Reed's autobiography, Peregrina

As part of my series of occasional conversations with other writers:

Michael K. Schuessler, author of the biographies Guadalupe Amor: La undécisima musa (The Eleventh Muse) and Elena Poniatowska: An Intimate Portrait, and editor of journalist Alma Reed's long-lost autobiography, Peregrina: Love and Death in Mexico. Recorded in Mexico City on March 8, 2012. (Approx 1 hour and 7 minutes)


>>Click here to listen now.

Top 10 Books Read 2011

1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
I have so much to say about this, why, I wrote a whole blog.

2. What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
The concept of the "technium" is something I find myself coming back to again and again. The author writes a brilliant blog called The Technium.

3. The Magus of Strovolos: The Extraordinary World of a Spiritual Healerby Kyriacos C. Markides
This was one of the many books I read in preparing the introduction to my translation of Francisco I. Madero's Spiritist Manual of 1911. Sociologist Markides' work stands out among the many books on esoteric subjects not only for the quality of the writing, but the author's open-heartedness combined with discernment. If anyone were to ask me where to start reading on the subjects of healers and mediums, I would tell them to start with Markides.

4. Holy Sh*t: Managing Manure to Save Mankind by Gene Logsdon
Highly amusing. I've become a fan of the author's blog, The Contrary Farmer, where, by the way, you can download a free e-book of his best posts.

5. Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and Living in Viet Nam by Wayne Karlin
Transcendent and fascinating, this is one of the most important works to come out of the Viet Nam War.

6. To Be Young by Mary Luytens
Oh, those wacky Theosophists...

7. Francisco I. Madero by Stanley R. Ross
The classic of the 1950s. I have my quibbles about the book but overall, it is an impressive work of original scholarship and reads as smoothly as a good novel. I'd put it on my short list of recommended books to read about Mexico.

8. Art, Life and UFOs: A Memoir by Budd Hopkins
A deeply strange book by a deeply courageous and all-around original American.

9. Peregrina: Love & Death in Mexico by Alma M. Reed, Edited and with an introduction by Michael K. Scheussler; Foreword by Elena Poiatowska
This is the memoir of Alma Reed, a San Francisco journalist, a feminist far head of her time, who came to Mexico and fell in love with Yucatan's charismatic left-leaning governor, Felipe Carrillo Puerto. They were engaged to be married when he was murdered in 1924.(I hope to interview Michael K. Schuessler about this book for my Conversations with Other Writers podcasts in 2012.)

10. The Beekeeper's Lament by Hannah Nordhaus

Top 10 Books Read 2010
Top 10 Books Read 2009
Top 10 Books Read 2008
Top 10 Books Read 2007
Top 10 Books Read 2006

Yvette Grutter and C.M. Mayo, Democrats Abroad in Mexico City

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of presenting my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, at the exhibition of paintings by artist Yvette Grutter for the Mexico City chapter of Democrats Abroad. Ever since, I've been meaning to post this photo, which gives an idea of Yvette's gloriously vivid works (she's the one with the halo!).(Check out her website at www.yvettegrutter.com). The venue was a sueño: an apartment overlooking Chapultepec Park, and with eagle's eye view of Chapultepec Castle.

Also in attendance: Michael K. Schuessler, biographer of Elena Poniatowska and Pita Amor, and editor of the sublime Alma M. Reed's memoir, Peregrina: Love & Death in Mexico--- more about that amazing book anon.

P.S. A lot of you have been asking me when I will present the novel in Spanish, El último príncipe del Imperio Mexicano, which has just come out in Mexico with Grijalbo-Random House-Mondadori. The answer is: soon. To sign up for my newletter, click here; for updates on events, click here.

More anon.