New Podcast-- A Traveler in Mexico: A Rendezvous with Writer Rosemary Sullivan

Just uploaded a new podcast: my reading of my article for Inside Mexico, "A Traveler in Mexico: A Rendezvous with Writer Rosemary Sullivan." Sullivan is the author of Villa Air-Bel: WWII, Escape, and a House in Marseilles, a beautifully written and deeply researched work which tells the harrowing stories of several refugee artists, including many who came to Mexico. (Fans of Leonora Carrington, P.K. Page and Remedios Vario, this is for you!)

Surf on:

>>Read the original article on-line at Inside Mexico
>>Visit Rosemary Sullivan's webpage
(and you'll find there "The Road Out," a documentary about Villa Air-Bel)
>>Read "Three Traveler's in Mexico," by Rosemary Sullivan in Literal
>>Listen to all C.M. Mayo podcasts on podomatic or on iTunes
>>Podcast page http://www.cmmayo.com/podcasts.html

Madam Mayo's Top 10 Books Read 2009

#1. Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille by Rosemary Sullivan
Read my review / profile of Rosemary Sullivan for Inside Mexico here.

#2. Tras las huellas de un desconocido: Nuevos datos y aspectos de Maximiliano de Habsburgo by Konrad Ratz
A crucially important new work by Dr. Konrad Ratz, Austrian expert on Mexico's Second Empire. Covering a wide range of previously unknown or only superficially explored subjects relevant to Maximilian's life and brief rule in Mexico.

#3. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
The mega-paradigm shift explained by a leading networks scientist in plain, if elegant, English. Though this book first came out in 2002, it's well worth reading for the light it shines on the current financial crisis.

#4. My Grandfather's Finger by Edward Swift
An eccentric, elegant, and unblinkingly compassionate memoir of growing up in the thick of the Big Thicket.

#5. The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper
A story every American should read.

#6. The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. by Sandra Gulland
An epistolary novel that brings the French Revolution and not only Josephine, but many of France's most intriguing personalities to such life, it sometimes seemed hard to believe I was reading fiction. Gorgeous.

#7. Midday with Buñuel by Claudio Isaac
I was both charmed and moved by this poetic memoir by Mexican filmmaker and writer Claudio Isaac about his friendship with his mentor, the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, who died in Mexico City in 1983.

#8. Marcel Proust: A Life by Edmund White
Oh, writers...

#9. Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley
Mum and Pup of the title were William and Pat Buckley whom I-- and many millions of other Americans--- knew by their glamorous doings as chronicled in the likes of W. This is a headshaker of a memoir, but then it's about a very peculiar and supremely public couple, and by their son. Beautifully written. One of those few books that merits a re-read or three.

#10. Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard
What a splendid book. She's also a master of the intended diction drop-- which is sometimes hilarious.

---> Top 10 Books read 2008
---> Top 10 Books Read 2007
---> Top 10 Books Read 2006

A Traveler in Mexico: A Rendezvous with Writer Rosemary Sullivan (Inside Mexico)

My profile of Canadian writer and poet Rosemary Sullivan and her book Villa Air-Bel is now on-line in the new issue of Inside Mexico.

Coyoacán has become inextricably linked with painter Frida Kahlo, so what better place to rendezvous with poet, writer, and biographer of Surrealists Rosemary Sullivan? A professor of English at the University of Toronto, Sullivan had just alighted in Mexico City and would soon be on her way to meet with Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington when we met over cappuccinos at the sun-drenched Café Moheli to talk about her latest book.

Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille is a page-turner of a deeply researched history about the rescue of artists and intellectuals trapped as the Nazis closed in. This effort, promoted by the New York-based Emergency Rescue Committee and their agent in Marseilles, Varian Fry, managed to save André Breton, Marc Chagall, and Max Ernst, among others, and found refuge for them in the United States. But some came to Mexico, including Russian novelist Victor Serge, his son Vlady, and most famously Surrealist painters Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, who today (along with Frida Kahlo) are among Mexico's most revered artists. For this reason, Villa Air-Bel is a work important to the history of modern art in Mexico.

But the book's connection to Mexico goes deeper.

"Villa Air-Bel started here," Sullivan said. ...READ MORE