Enter Allan Kardec, Chef du Spiritisme

Racing to meet the deadline.... I'm almost finished with my revised and expanded introduction to Spiritist Manual, my translation of Manual Espírita, the secret book of 1911 by Francisco I. Madero, leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico 1911-1913.  This excerpt mentions Swedenborg and the Fox sisters of Hydesville-- more about them anon.

Enter Allen Kardec, Chef du Spiritisme

Allan Kardec

Though an energetic evangelist, Francisco I. Madero schemed to hide his Spiritism from the public—his personal letters during his campaigns and his presidency make this clear—  and, over the several decades after his death, few Mexicans in public positions have had the incentive, the metaphysical context, or whatever wherewithal to begrudge more than a glancing mention of it. As early as 1915, any public discussion of Spiritism became taboo—historian Yolia Tortolero uses this word, and quite rightly, even while, as she also notes, Spiritism was being practiced “under cover by many public figures.” There is more to say about this thundering silence about Spiritism in Mexico, which, with a few notable exceptions, has persisted to this day, but to first properly comprehend the term we must hie back to Paris of 1891 and, reanimating our scene, let that page of La Revue Spirite fall. And another.

This magazine Pancho Madero is reading belongs to his father—though his mother and other family members are devout Catholics and, as he surely knows, the Pope had declared the main ritual of Spiritualism and its derivative, Spiritism, the séance, diabolical. Decades earlier, Pope Pius IX had slapped the works of Allan Kardec, founder of La Revue Spirite, on the Index, the Vatican’s list of prohibited books.

Allan Kardec: this elbow-sharp and magnetic nom de plume, supposedly taken from one of his other lifetimes as a Druid priest, belonged to a French educator named Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, who died in 1869. From his stern-looking portrait, with his knob-chin and kingly pose, one might take him for a mightily conservative banker. Kardec was an unlikely guru. According to his English translator, Anna Blackwell, he was “grave, slow of speech, unassuming in manner, yet not without a certain quiet dignity.” Further, and somewhat frighteningly, “he was never known to laugh.” Yet anyone who doubts his influence, from France to Mexico, Brazil to the Philippines, can visit Paris’s Père La Chaise cemetery and find, among the stone angels and sarcophagi and mausoleums of the likes of Chopin, Collette, Victor Hugo, La Fontaine and Molière, Kardec’s megalithic tomb ever-heaped with flowers.

Rivail had been educated by the Swiss Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who, radically for the time, emphasized freedom of thought and direct observation. According to John Warne Monroe in Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France, Rivail was a longtime student of mesmerism in 1853 when he learned of the strange phenomenon of the tables parlantes or table tipping, from a friend who said he had managed to induce a table to lift by itself off the ground and turn, and more: like the Fox sisters of Hydesville, he was communicating with spirits through the table by means of raps and knocks.

Though skeptical, Rivail determined to study this phenomenon. He soon moved on to observing mediumistic writing, in which two young mediums, the Mlles Baudin, would place their fingertips on a planchette, a triangular contraption with little wheels and a pencil attached, thus allowing spirits to answer his questions and offer messages in writing.

It was the spirit “Zéphyr” who assigned him the name Allan Kardec, and, along with other spirits, such a mass of teachings to solve “the controversial problem of humanity’s past and future,”  that Rivail turned it into a book—including additional information channeled by medium Célina Japhet. Published in 1857, Le Livre des Esprits, (The Book of the Spirits), concurrently with the levitating medium D.D. Homes’ visit to France, became a best-seller of its time, translated into multiple languages, and is still in print today. 

With down-to-earth language and easy-to-reference numbered questions and answers, The Book of the Spirits is a guide to nothing less than the universe and its laws, the nature of God, the spirit world and its relations with humanity. The concluding message, channeled from the spirit of Saint Augustine, calls for kindness and benevolence. It is this work that first spelled out the doctrine of Spiritism, which Kardec distinguishes from Spiritualism—the latter, according to him, simply the belief that there is more than physical matter— as a doctrine based on the specific nature of relations between the physical and spirit worlds. Spiritism’s most notable departure from Spiritualism is its assertion that spirits reincarnate as, in life after life, whether on Earth or some other planet, they evolve into ever greater states of consciousness.

This was the most modern of modern science, Kardec argued, for, as a scientist might peer through a microscope to see the detail in a leaf, so he could employ a medium to communicate with the spirit world. Through Ermance Dufaux, a teenaged medium famous for her channeled autobiography of Joan of Arc, a nameless spirit instructed Kardec to publish La Revue Spirite as soon as possible and using his own money and so, in 1858, he did. In 1861, Kardec published Le Livre des Médiums (The Book on Mediums), a how-to and advisory on the dangers of communicating with spirits based on his own and collagues’ experiences as well as more material channeled from spirits, among them Erastrus, Channing, “Spirit of Truth,” and Matthew. More followed: The Gospel Explained by Spirits (1864) ; Heaven and Hell (1865); and Genesis (1867), in addition to shorter works. 

This was the Swedenborg-sized pile that Pancho Madero, having finished with La Revue Spirite, ran to that magazine’s offices to purchase. In his words:

"I did not read [Kardec’s] books; I devoured them, for their doctrines were so rational, so beautiful, so new, they seduced me and ever since I consider myself a Spiritist." 

That is to say, Madero believed he had incarnated on this planet in order to help usher in a golden age, evangelist for the doctrine that was nothing less than, to quote Kardec in Genesis, “the pivot on which the human race will turn.”

Our Coahuilan prince has stepped onto his metaphysical Montgolfier, as it were. Soon he will be tossing sandbags overboard.

(Copyright © C.M. Mayo 2013, all rights reserved) 

>>Read more about the Spiritist Manual (website includes Q & A and resources for researchers)
>>Get the current edition on Kindle.

>>Read a previous excerpt on this blog, "Madame Blavatsky, Messenger from the Mahatmas"

***UPDATE My book, Metaphysical Odyssey Into the Mexican Revolution, is now available***

COMMENTS

Guest-blogger Children's Author Mary Lynn Patton with 5 Links on Mexico and E-Publishing

Mary Lynn Patton

Delighted to see Mary Lynn Patton's first two children's books, Sounds of Mexico and Sounds of Mexico Maya, up in the iBookstore with links from www.MaryLynnPattonBooks.com. As Mary Lynn writes:

"These two bilingual books star my canary, Pavarotti, who loves to sing along with the sounds of Mexico. He takes the reader on adventures set in the magical mountains of Tepoztlan in the first book and the sacred land of the Maya people in the second. I recall with a chuckle my first plea for your help in finding a publisher for these books and your suggestion to self-publish as an iBook (books with sound require a connection to iTunes so the Amazon/Kindle combination was not possible). My collaborators, illustrator Margarita Sada from Mexico City, Salvador Espinosa, sound engineer, and Judith Segura, translator, and I (all from Tepoztlan, Morelos home to the Canadian Mexican Literary Festival), worked together to publish. It was thrilling. By the second book we were becoming increasingly interactive in our presentation and for the third book we are considering the Read Aloud feature available in iBooks. I want a hard copy published book to hold in addition to these e-books but as the Madam herself asserts (Seven Reasons Why E-Books Will Be Big in Mexico) this works to reach readers here and now. A bit of research revealed the phenomenal escalating sales for e-books, $1.3 billion in 2012 (No, E-book Sales Are Not Declining). Mexico City has a new eBook publishing company called editorial-ink for digital books (www.editorial-ink.com) and a new digital library (http://goodereader.com/blog/most-popular-news/largest-childrens-library-in-mexico-opens-and-uses-3000-ebooks/). Children the world over from middle and upper class homes are receiving iPad minis in child-proof cases as their birthday surprise to download interactive books."

> Recent guest-bloggers here at Madam Mayo include novelists Victoria Wilcox, Amy Kwei, and Joanna Hershon. 
> Check out the complete archive of guest-blogs here.
P.S. My embryonic and to-be-frequently-updated list of recommended reading on Mexico is here.

Madame Blavatsky, Messenger from the Mahatmas

An excerpt from the section on the history of 19th century metaphysics in my forthcoming book, Metaphysical Odyssey Into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual:

Madame Blavatsky, Messenger from the Mahatmas

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

As Don Evaristo Madero cast his massive shadow over northern Mexico, so Helena Petrovna Blavatsky cast hers over metaphysically-minded Western civilization, that is to say, Europe, England, Australia, and the Americas, for she was the monumental figure of modern esotericism. (Not that that those two ever met. I am quite sure that if they had, any crockery in the vicinity would have exploded.)

She was fat and her eyes bulged. She swore like a stevedore, her tobacco was cheap, and the flower pots around her piled up with stubs. Madame Blavatsky had left her husband in Russia, first breaking a candlestick over his head, and then, before arriving to settle for a spell in New York, traveled to Central America, all over Europe, several times to Egypt (where, among other exploits, she disguised herself as a Muslim man and studied Coptic magic), and twice trekked into Tibet to attend a secret school led by enlighted sages called “mahatmas,” or “Great White Brothers.” She also claimed that, after her return to the West, she remained in telepathic communication with the mahatmas, who could also travel anywhere on earth and the universe by means of their astral bodies. 

A psychic medium and self-styled scholar, Madam Blavatsky exuded a charisma impossible to fathom. Her presence seemed to occasion fires, raps, knocks, tables rising from the floor, and messages in golden ink from the mahatmas dropping out of thin air. Her fellow Theosophist William Quan Judge recalled “marvels wholly unexplainable on the theory of jugglery,” including little orbs creeping over the furniture in her apartment in New York City and, as she sat in the parlor, a spoon flying into her hand all the way from the kitchen.

In a word, Madame Blavatsky made Cagliostro look like a pipqueak and Monsieur Kardec, for all his spirit world adventures via teenaged mediums, thoroughly bourgeois. 

For Madame Blavatsky, there were higher truths than Christianity and Spiritualism and its Johnny-come-lately offshoot, Spiritism; the Orient, wellspring of Buddhism and Hinduism, was the authentic source of spiritual knowledge. 

Now, to take an orbit-worthy leap over novel-length episodes—among them, Blavatsky’s meeting with Col. Henry Steel Olcott in the Vermont farmhouse of the Eddy brothers, mediums who brought forth such shades of the dead as a giant Winnebago chief, a squaw with her pet flying squirrel, and a naval officer in full dress with a sword— Blavatsky and Olcott founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. Not a religion, it was an association to promote religious universality, and that included Buddhism and Hinduism— which, as one might imagine, would not endear them to Christian missionaries and many of the colonial authorities. 

Our young Mexican Spiritist never joined, but he, like many outstanding figures whom we remember today, from inventor Thomas Edison to Paul Gaugin, novelist D.H. Lawrence and poet W.B. Yeats, and the leader of India’s independence movement, Mohandas Gandhi, were influenced by Madame Blavatsky, and, as we shall see in Madero’s case especially—  and crucially— the Theosophists’ enthusiasm for the Hindu wisdom book, The Bhagavad Gita. 

So before spiraling on to Mexico, we must slow for a moment to pack into another nutshell another ouevre. 

Blavatsky’s first book, Isis Unveiled, published in 1877 and still in print, was inspired, she claimed, by the mahatmas and is nothing less than, as the subtitle says, the Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. A decade later, in 1888, after she and Olcott had stirred up a Buddhist revival in Ceylon and removed the headquarters of the Theosophical Society to Adyar, near Madras in India, Blavatsky published her massive two volume The Secret Doctrine, also still in print, which provides the spiritual history of the cosmos and human life based on the stanzas of the Dyzan.

The first:

THE ETERNAL PARENT (SPACE), WRAPPED IN HER EVER INVISIBE ROBES, HAD SLUMBERED ONCE AGAIN FOR SEVEN ETERNITIES.

Another, number 40, plucked at random: 

THEN THE THIRD AND FOURTH (RACES) BECAME TALL WITH PRIDE. WE ARE THE KINGS, IT WAS SAID; WE ARE THE GODS.

No one had heard of the Dyzan, nor has any scholar yet found it. Blavatsky claimed that it was part of the commentary esoteric literature of Tibetan Buddhism and that she had memorized the stanzas as given to by her teacher in North India and Tibet, where she first arrived in the 1850s. That she, a European woman traveling solo, made it into Tibet at all might sound preposterous if not for the fact that, among other sightings, one Captain Charles Murray of the Bengal Army encountered her on the Sikkim border. According to Michael Gomes, editor of the abridged version of The Secret Doctrine, esoteric scholars have noted similarities of these stanzas to the literature of the Kalachakra, or “Wheel of Time,” the ancient Tibetan Buddhist esoteric scripture blending Hindu and Buddhist ideas. And the Kalachakra, by the way, is a living idea. A quick google search brought up a lengthy discussion by His Holiness the Dalai Lama on his website, http://www.dalailama.com/teachings/kalachakra-initiations, and a video tour of the fabulously intricate 3D structure of the Kalachakra Mandala, a visual representation of the teachings, made in honor of the Dalai Lama’s 2007 visit to Cornell University, at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~kb/mandala/  . (With the low-voiced chanting and clanging, it is all very wonderfully mesmerizing.)

What to conclude about the Dyzan? I am not planning to get a PhD in Tibetan Buddhist studies (not in this lifetime anyway), but I can stretch so far as to agree with Gomes, who concludes that, “[f]act or fiction, the stanzas [of the Dyzan] provide one of the greatest mythos of our time, whose influence on modern esotericism is undeniable.”

Copyright C.M. Mayo all rights reserved.


***UPDATE: Read W. B. Yeats on Madame Blavatsky in The Trembling of the Veil-- very amusing. Includes a link to the free ebook.

>>Read more about Francisco I. Madero's Spiritist Manual (including resources for researchers)

>>Read another excerpt, Enter Allan Kardec, Chef du Spiritsme

P.S. As a result of this unexpectedly Mount Everest-esque project, and a laptop crash, I have fallen woefully behind on the Marfa Mondays podcasts. But stay tuned... three fascinating interviews are almost ready to go: Dallas Baxter, founding editor of Cenizo Journal; Enrique Madrid of Redfern; and historian John Tutino, author of the magnificent Making a New World, are all almost ready to go. (Eleven posted so far, 13 to go.) 

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


***UPDATE: Excellent and fascinating interview with Blavatsky expert Michael Gomes.

Guest-blogger Victoria Wilcox with 5 Sites for Scarlett Fans

Victoria Wilcox

I am delighted to host guest-blogger Victoria Wilcox who has just published what promises to be a fascinating read, a novel based on the true story of Doc Holliday-- one wild dentist, I'll say. Usually we think of Doc out west, slinging a gun, but he hailed from the Old South and had some surprising connections there, as Wilcox explains. And she ought to know: not only did she write the novel about him, but she is founding director of Georgia’s Holliday-Dorsey-Fife House Museum, the antebellum home of the family of Doc Holliday. It was her work with the house that led to eighteen years of original research and inspired her novel trilogy, Southern Son: The Saga of Doc Holliday. Inheritance, the first book in the Southern Son saga was published this month by Knox Robinson Publishing. 

Ghosts of Gone With the Wind: 5 Sites for Scarlett Fans

by Victoria Wilcox

Who would have guessed, when I moved to Georgia hoping to find a few ghosts of Gone With the Wind, that my life would be forever haunted by Margaret Mitchell’s bestselling novel of the Old South?  I was just a fan like any other, having read the book a few times and watched the movie a few times more, the only exception between me and other fans being an interesting calendar connection: I was born on Margaret Mitchell’s birthday, November the 8^th.   But when my love of history and a project to save a Gone With the Wind style historic site led to my novel trilogy, Southern Son: The Saga of Doc Holliday, the epic story of the South’s most famous Western legend, our shared birthday began to seem downright spooky – November 8^th was also the date that Doc Holliday died.  

The historic site was the Holliday-Dorsey-Fife House, the antebellum home of Doc Holliday’s cousins in Fayetteville, Georgia, a classic white-columned Southern mansion where Doc played as a child, and where he began a young romance with his cousin Mattie Holliday, the girl who would become the model for Melanie in Gone With the Wind.  The Hollidays were kin to Margaret Mitchell, and she was said to have visited the house and suggested it as a filming site for the movie version of Tara.  The place is even mentioned in the first chapter of Gone With the Wind, as Scarlett O’Hara attended the Fayetteville Academy, a private school once housed there.  

While Scarlett was fictional, however, there was a real Southern belle who really went to the school and had a lot in common with Scarlett: they both lived on big cotton plantations in neighboring Clayton County, they both had feisty Irish fathers named Gerald, they both had genteel mothers who had green velvet drapes in their parlor windows, they both went to Atlanta during the Civil War and survived with a little bit of grace and a whole lot of “gumption.”  The real girl was Annie FitzGerald, and she was Margaret Mitchell’s grandmother.  

It’s no wonder Gone With the Wind seems so real to its readers.  There was a lot of truth behind its story of the Old South, and a better-than-fiction link to the Wild, Wild West.  These ghosts have a great story to tell!      

For more real tales of Gone With the Wind, check out the following five sites:

The Margaret Mitchell House Museum, the Atlanta apartment when the author typed her epic tale.

Scarlett O’Hara’s Atlanta, an interactive map that takes you into the 1860’s city.

Gone With the Wind Scrapbook, a fun collection of all things Scarlett.

Gone With the Wind Online Exhibit, movie memorabilia from the David O. Selznik collection at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Gone With the Wind Background from the AMC Filmsite Movie Review, gives a complete synopsis of the movie for who haven’t watched it but want to sound like they have.

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>Recent guest-blogs include Joanna Hershon with 5 links from A Dual Inheritance that Traverse the Globe and Amy Kwei with 5 recommended books on China.

>Click here for the complete archive of Madam Mayo's guest-blogs.

Cyberflanerie: San Miguel de Allende Edition

Patrice Wynne, owner of Abrazos in San Miguel de Allende

I love San Miguel de Allende because I have so many friends there and the arty vibe is delicious (and the food, too). Herewith a batch of SMA links:

My amiga Patrice Wynne, owner of Abrazos, is featured in this NYT article on retiring in Mexico.
I say she has it totally right.

News flash: El Centro de las Artes in San Miguel de Allende is getting a big boost from the Mexican government. This is going to be bodacious.

My amiga Dianne Romaine has a new blog about writing, playing music, and creating community in a Guanajuato barrio (a hop skip and a brinco from SMA)

Check out the website of Lulu Torbet, an amazing artist and (ghost writer too) with beautiful energy.

Sign up for the newsletter from the Galeria Atotonilco, you will be amazed. This is folk art above & beyond the stuff you'll find in tourist shops.

Maria Espinosa on memories of Mexico and writing a first novel.

My favorite San Miguel painters: Mariló Carral, Edgar Soberón, and Kelley Vandiver.

Listen in:

My talk for PEN San Miguel / Sol Literary Magazine in San Miguel's Teatro Angela Peralta, about a unique Egyptian-inspired teaching house on the US-Mexico border: A Visit to Swan House.  

And my other talk earlier last year on my translation of Spiritist Manual by Francisco I. Madero, leader of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. 

And (yep, I really do get to SMA), my talk on the novel based on the true story, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire.

My interview with Edward Swift, SMA resident, artist and author of many delightful books including one of my all-time favorite memoirs, My Grandfather's Finger. 

And finally, check out Sol, the magazine of literary writing from Mexico in English.

P.S. New on my webpage, an annotated list, embryonic and to-be-frequently updated, of recommended books on Mexico.

Yes, the Marfa Mondays podcasts will be resuming shortly.

Guest-blogger Amy Kwei, author of A Concubine for the Family, on 5 Recommended Books on China

Guest-blogging today is my fellow Women's National Book Association member, novelist Amy Kwei, author of the just-released A Concubine for the Family, which is based on an amazing true story of her own family. Here's what she has to say about it:

Imagine a wife lovingly gives a younger woman to her husband as a birthday present! A Concubine for the Family is a fictionalized account based upon this “true-life” event of my Chinese Grandmother's gift to ensure a male heir for the family. This is a story of feminine solidarity and heroism. 

The main characters belong to the Confucian elite and share the same family dominated values as many present-day leaders of Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. Simply written, the novel is divided into three “books”, and follows the fortunes of the “book-fragrant” Huang family from Hangzhou, China to Shanghai and Hong Kong in 1937 — 1941, when China was emerging into Westernization, the Sino-Japanese war and WWII.

The daily life and society of this household are steeped in the traditions of decency, nobility, loyalty and cunning maneuvers for survival. They give the reader an instant understanding of Chinese culture and how they differ from our own. Poetry, silk cultivation, foot-binding, acupuncture and opium addiction are intertwining threads throughout the book. The daughters bring comic relief. Two Americans, a children’s tutor and a visiting reporter, introduce conflicting Western values. 

The novel’s second “book” highlights episodes of great glamour, shrewd business and political intrigue occurring in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation. Book Three details the Huang family living in Hong Kong, under British colonialism. The novel holds promise to become a Chinese Downton Abbey. 

Want to learn more about China? Amy Kwei has recently read and warmly recommends:

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolo Guo.  A quick read and an edgy story of how the Chinese and Westerner differ in the concept of love. 

Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Live, Love and Language by Deborah Fallows. Humorous insights into the Chinese language.

China Airborn by James Fallows. Gives a good understanding of how China is investing a huge sum to jump-start its aerospace industry.  

Mother on Fire, by Sandra Tsing Loh. A fast, fun story that will irritate her parent. 

Busy working on the sequel to A Concubine for the Family — Under the Red Moon. Research readings include The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang.

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Amy found out my blog after reading my note in the WNBA newsletter about my dad's book, Captured: The Forgotten Men of Guam, by Roger Mansell-- which does have quite a bit to do with China and she was kind enough to recommend it, also. 

Speaking of Iris Chang, my #1 book read in 2010 was Finding Iris Chang, a memoir by her close friend and fellow journalist / writer, Paula Kamen.

Interested in guest-blogging for "Madam Mayo" blog? Guidelines here. Archive of all previous guest-blog posts here.

So How's the Book Doing? (And how many books have you sold? And what was your print run?)

>> READ THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

My amiga the crackerjack memoirist and writing teacher Sara Mansfield Taber has posted an oh-so-true toe-curling but chuckle-worthy blog post over at She Writes: "Writing Is a Humiliation Banquet."

It reminds me of how gallery owners complain that customers (more often lookyloos) don't know "gallery etiquette." It's the same with writers. People usually mean well when they ask, "So how's the book doing?" Though alas, this is often followed by the more knife-like, "How many books have you sold?" What they don't realize is that (in most instances) this is akin to asking someone who was just turned down for a long overdue promotion, or maybe even fired, "So how much do you make?" because, as Sara Taber so eloquently points out, the book is almost never doing as well as its author had hoped it would and for most literary books, earnings hover well below the level at which one might cobble together a non-food-stamps-worthy living. Furthermore, publishers report sales with such a long lag, one never really knows at any given moment. (True, one could check amazon.com sales reports but I have never done that because it's a self-torture fest and, for anyone focused on writing the next book, a mega time-suck.)

Herewith some of my favorite replies (and if you're an author with a book out, may they serve you):

(With a wink): I'm getting away with it... How about you?
(This is thanks to Paul Graybeal of Marfa's Moonlight Gemstones, by the way.)

(Breathily, Nancy Reaganqesque): Why my dear, that's like asking a woman her age! How have you been?

(Beaming, ready-to-judo): Oh, great! You know, I think everyone should write a book. Do you have a book you'd like to write?

(Shrugging, Jimmy Fallonesque): Well, I haven't moved full-time onto my yacht-- yet. But thanks for asking. How are you?

(Gleaming stare, revealing teeth): Very well... in fact... my doctor has been able to... reduce my meds... (Continue staring silently for three beats...) Just kidding! How are you?

Notice, the trick is to lob that conversational ball back into their court. Unless you might have something for them, e.g.,

Wonderfully! Thanks for asking! Oh, and by the way, I'll be doing an event at the bookstore next Thursday at 6 pm, it would be wonderful if you could come!

It's been such fun! Oh, and by the way, if it works for your book group / workshop / class, I'd be delighted to come talk about the book! 

The thing is, I don't think most people really care about one's answer; they're just asking to be polite, as they might ask about your kids (whom they don't know) or your kitchen remodeling project or even just chatting about the weather. And some friends really do care, they do mean well-- they're delighted to know a real-live-published author! They want to bask in your literary glamour and talk books! For those folks, the "I'm getting away with it," or "wonderfully, thanks for asking!" works fine. But then there are those, usually with a toe in the publishing business, or ambitious to write / publish themselves, who persist with the outrageous, "What was your print run?" Well, I say, bless 'em. Because they need blessing. I answer, "You know, I have no idea. I am so busy with my next book... " and when they insist (yikes, some of them do), "What do you mean, you don't know what was the print run?" I put on the Scarlett O'Hara:

"Why, golly gee, numbers just go in one ear and out the other."

When a writer has spent several years working on a book she has more emotion invested in it than the casual reader would guess. So if it's another writer who is asking and your book is doing splendidly, why rub in the salt? Or, more likely, since your book isn't selling anything like Dan Brown's latest, make your neighbor (the divorce lawyer who is going to write a thriller "one day") view you with head-shaking pity?

But I don't find writing a "humiliation banquet," quite the contrary. I am grateful that I have the skill and (most days) focus to write and that, in one way or another, my work finds readers. I'm always happy to see more royalties but I don't measure my success as a writer by numbers alone. A single  reader who approaches my work in a spirit of respect and intellectual curiosity, and to whom my book makes a meaningful difference, is worth more to me than 10,000 readers who just want a beachside page-turner.

(Bless you all who write beachside page-turners! May you all live happily ever after on your yachts! But I don't read such books and wouldn't have the wherewithal to write one, and anyway, even if I had a hundred bagilliwillion bucks, I couldn't be bothered with a yacht. To start with, I'd have to insure the darned thing. What a bore!)

So how does one make a living? All I can say is, if you want to make a living writing literary books you'll need to be (a) very lucky (b) very persistent (c) very productive (d) very hard-headed and (e) totally flummoxed by shopping (except for books, of course). And by the way, most literary writers don't make a living from their books but from teaching, freelancing, editing, and/or other work / income.

The "humiliation banquet" comes with the promotion part... and for that, thank goodness for the vast and ever-growing literature on sports psychology!

P.S. Check out my podcast interview with Sara Mansfield Taber about her fascinating memoir on "Conversations with Other Writers."

>Comments?

Recommended Reading on Mexico

New over at my home page, www.cmmayo.com-- in answer to the frequently asked question, what books can I recommend on Mexico? --  an embryonic and to-be-frequently updated list for English language readers, for both dyed-in-the-serape Mexicophiles and those encountering Mexico for the first time.

I'll be adding more commentary and more links as well.

P.S. Stay tuned for the Marfa Mondays podcasts, resuming shortly.

Guest-blogger Joanna Hershon: 5 Links from A Dual Inheritance that Traverse the Globe

Delighted to host the widely-lauded novelist and cyber amiga de Todos Santos, Joanna Hershon, guest-blogging about her novel-- pub date yesterday!-- A Dual Inheritance (Ballantine Books). Here's the catalog description of what promises to be fabulous read:

Autumn 1962: Ed Cantowitz and Hugh Shipley meet in their final year at Harvard. Ed is far removed from Hugh’s privileged upbringing, yet his drive and ambition outpace Hugh’s ambivalence about his own life. These two young men form an unlikely friendship, bolstered by a fierce shared desire to transcend their circumstances. But in just a few short years, not only do their paths diverge, but their friendship ends abruptly, with only one of them understanding why. Can a friendship define your view of the world? Spanning from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the present-day stock market collapse, A Dual Inheritance asks this question, as it follows not only these two men, but the complicated women in their vastly different lives. And as Ed and Hugh grow farther and farther apart, they remain uniquely—even surprisingly—connected.

Five Links from A Dual Inheritance that Traverse the Globe

By Joanna Hershon

1) A Dual Inheritance starts in 1962 at Harvard, and this article about an iconic restaurant (and the site of a scene in the novel) and it's closing, evokes both the place-- so international and campus-glamorous-- and a sense of nostalgia, which seems appropriately representative of this book.

 
2) This film, The Nuer by Robert Gardner, is the inspiration for Chapter Six. Hugh Shipley graduates from Harvard in 1963 and goes to Africa with a film crew to assist his mentor. It's there in Ethiopia where his career path changes focus and takes a surprising turn. Writing about a young man on a precipice of his life, in the middle of the bush, so vulnerable to not only the elements, but to his own fragile psyche, was challenging, and while I was writing this chapter, I'd watch this film over and over and revel in its beauty and its otherness. 

3) My Pinterest board for A Dual Inheritance. What a pleasure it was to dream visually about the worlds of my novel. It didn't occur to me to even look at Pinterest until long after I was finished writing, when my imaginary worlds were so much more real than any photographs. 

4) Chapter Sixteen is set in Shenzhen, China in the late 1980's. There's very little online about this part of the world during this particular time, which was fascinating, in itself. I found a great deal on Chinese delicacies. Here's a gateway into that culinary world. 

5) Here is a link that's sure to amaze and inspire. Make sure to spend some time watching the incredible film footage. I went to high school with Dr. Amy Lehman, who happens to be an extraordinary thinker, doctor and leader. She is building a floating health clinic on Lake Tanganyika, which makes up 18 percent of the world's fresh water supply. The lake's surrounding communities (spanning four countries – Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Zambia) are currently without basic healthcare. Dr. Lehman and her ideas continue to influence and inspire. 

--Joanna Hershon 

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Recent Madam Mayo guest-blog posts include C. Marina Marhese with 5 Surprising Facts about Honey, Pollination, and Your Food  and John Kachuba on 5 Literary Ghosts.

For the complete archive of Madam Mayo's guest-blog posts, click here. 

Veterinary Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy in Mexico (Terapia hiperbárica) and etc.

Providentially, I first heard about hyperbaric oxygen therapy just a couple of weeks ago and now it turns out that my own dear 13 year old pug, suffering from acute respiratory distress, has been prescribed some sessions-- and already she is breathing normally again. It's a wondrous thing and quite simple-- basically, the same therapy given to divers suffering from the bends-- and the first and only veterinary hyperbaric oxygen chamber (cámara hiperbárica) south of the border is right here in Mexico City. (¡Qué suerte!)

>An excellent informative website about hyperbaric oxygen therapy for animals is here. (Photo is from their website, Veterinary Hyperbaric Oxygen VH02.)

While waiting in the wi-fi-less veterinary clinic (admiring the parade of chihuahuas, boxers, bulldogs & mutts) I plowed through all three volumes of Mary Lutyens' study of Jiddu Krishnamurti, which make for both fascinating and perplexing reading about a both charismatic and deeply mysterious personality. The reason I delved into this is that I'm revising my introduction to Francisco I. Madero's Spiritist Manual, published in 1911-- the very same year in which he took office as President of Mexico and Annie Besant and and C.W. Leadbeater created the Order of the Eastern Star, to prepare for the coming of the Lord Maitreya, purportedly in the vehicle of Krishnamurti, then a young boy taken (at some trouble) from his natural father. The connection with Madero? Well, not much, but Madero had a lot to say about the Bhagavadgita and his personal library includes the translation by Annie Besant, among other works by Besant and Leadbeater-- including the latter's The Lives of Alcyone, about the supposed previous lives of Krishnamurti (more probably owned by Sara de Madero, given the inscription on the frontpiece, however). More anon.

So the Marfa Mondays podcasts are woefully behind. Stay tuned.