Cyberflanerie: Digital Economics Edition

Enter Airbnb and a little far West Texas town starts turning into... read Rachel Monroe on housing trends in Marfa, TX

Robotenomics-- excellent new blog

Seth Roberts says Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of Bitcoin

(more bitocoiniana here)

Amazing prices for organic crops (Gene Logsdon, the Contrary Farmer)

(He's the author of the hilarious and profoundly insightful Holy Sh*t!)

How to Borrow Ebooks from your (USA) Local Public Library

Oh! It was this easy.

Free Getty Images (Bloggers Take Note!)

Hat tip to the Publicity Hound

Moneyless World

More anon.

Previous Cyberflanerie highlights: Sound & Noise; Bajacaliforniana; Camelmania; Selections from Gregory Gibson's Bookman's Log 

COMMENTS

A Visit to Swan House: Presidio Texas' Unique Adobe Teaching House Inspired by the Legacy of Hassan Fathy

My article for Cenizo Journal, winter 2013, is now available on my webpage.  (I read this and did a Q & A for PEN San Miguel de Allende, listen in anytime here.)

I first spied it from a Jeep on Casa Piedra Road: a huddle of oddly shaped brown buildings baking in the sun. I'd arrived at its modest gate after a mile and a bit of crunching over gravel up from the Rio Grande near Presidio on the U.S.-Mexico border. What interested me then—I was just starting my book on far West Texas, focusing on the probable route of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the would-be conquistador of Florida who got lost—was the landscape. Such raw, open vistas were easy to imagine seeing through that ill-starred Spaniard's eyes. From a cloudless dome, the February sun beat down on the rocks and tangles of mesquite and clumps of prickly pear cactus, and ocotillo that stretched on for what must have been, for anyone on foot, a merciless number of miles. To the northwest loomed the bulk of the Chinatis, to the east, the jagged and lavender Bofecillos, and into Mexico, the Sierra Grande.

..."That's Simone Swan's house."

...My guide, Charlie Angell, brought down the window to show me the object, until then mysterious to me, of our detour. He'd been showing me the sights along the Rio Grande- the Hoodoos, Closed Canyon, and the narrow shallows in the river at Lajitas where Cabeza de Vaca, then nearly eight years into his odyssey, may have waded across. Even today, in many places along the river, you could walk right up to its bank, pitch a stone, and it would thunk onto someone's alfalfa field in Mexico. Coming up Casa Piedra Road, we'd seen no one-just a flash of a jackrabbit. Already Charlie was making the U-turn back to Presidio.

..."It's Egyptian," he added.

...This, in a land of décor inspired by what I had come to think of as Ye Olde Cowboys & Indians, struck me like thunder. Well, was it like the inside of a Disneyland ride? Did she worship Isis? Once home, I Googled.

...Simone Swan, it turned out, is an adobe visionary with a distinguished career in the arts, including many years with Houston's Menil Foundation; her house, not Egyptian, exactly, nor a whim, but a work-in-progress used by her Adobe Alliance, a nonprofit for teaching earthen design and construction. And the Egyptian influence? Hassan Fathy.

...Not Fathy as in "Cathy," as an Egyptian acquaintance was quick to correct me, but Foh'tee.

...Another Google search bought up his book, published by the University of Chicago Press in translation from the French, Construir avec le peuple, as Architecture for the Poor. When I got my hands on a copy, I learned that Fathy was Egypt's greatest 20th century architect, renowned for rescuing ancient architectural features and techniques for building with mud brick, a material he passionately advocated for as abundant, and, when used appropriately, comfortable, ecological, sanitary, and beautiful.
...
...In his photo, he might have passed for an elderly Mexican lawyer with his halo of gray hair, mustache, red turtleneck and poncho-like burnouse. He squinted from behind his glasses in an expression at once pained and kind—entirely understable once I learned of his battles with the Egyptian bureaucracy, then enamored of Soviet-style steel and concrete housing, and his nonetheless unyielding commitment to building housing for and with the fellaheen, the peasants who lived in abject poverty.

...Born in 1900 into a wealthy family in Alexandria, Fathy did not set foot on one of his own family's many farms until he was in his twenties, and when he did, the wretchedness of its workers' houses shocked him. His solution, in part, was to build with better design and mud brick. Mud could be dug up easily, bricks could formed of the mud, animal dung, and a bit of straw, and then left to bake in the sun. The challenge was the cost of timber for roofing and, for brick vaults, timber for propping them up during construction. Egypt imported its timber from Europe. Then World War II broke out.

...Ancient Egyptians built vaults, many of which had survived for hundreds, even thousands of years, without using wood, but how? Every one of Fathy's attempts to construct a roof without wood collapsed in a heap of bricks and dust. But then his brother, who was working on the Aswan dam, mentioned that the Nubians, the dark-skinned people of Southern Egypt and Northern Sudan, roofed their houses and mosques without using wood.

In an a matter of two visits to Aswan, Hassan Fathy found the masons, barefoot and in turbans, who showed him their technique of roofing by means of parabola-shaped layers of adobe bricks laid at an angle against a back wall. The bricks had extra straw for lightness, and a groove, made by the scrape of a finger before they'd dried, on one side, so as to give the mortared brick "grab." Mortar was a mix of sand, clay, and water. Using no tools other than an adze, and a plank for scaffolding, two men threw up a fine mud-brick roof over a 10' x 13' room in one and a half days.

...Marveled Fathy, "It was so unbelievably simple."

...When Simone Swan was living in New York, a house with two courtyards came to her in a dream. And it seemed like a dream to me that, less than a year after I'd first glimpsed Swan House from the road, I was sitting with its owner in the Nubian vault that was the living room, the shell high above us aglow with the orange light of morning. A graceful eighty-something with a crown of snow-white hair, Simone Swan was telling me how, at mid-life in the 1970s, she had gone to Paris for the Menil Foundation's exihibition of the surrealist Max Ernst's paintings, and at a dinner party, met a filmmaker who had just wrapped a documentary on the world's greatest architect.

...Simone laughed. "I said, Hassan Who?"   . . . . CONTINUE READING

Marfa Mondays Returns with an Interview with Dallas Baxter, "This Precious Place"

A metaphorical asteroid took out the past few months, but (whew) the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project resumes today with podcast #12, an interview with Cenizo Journal's founding editor, Dallas Baxter.

Baxter had just turned over Cenizo Journal to its new owner when I interviewed her last February 2013 in Alpine (about an half hour's drive from Marfa). She had arrived from New York just around the time of 9/11, and as editor of a journal covering the arts and history of the Big Bend / Trans-Pecos region of far West Texas, Baxter has an usually rich experience and perspective. If you wonder how a print publication can make it in this crazy digital age, and what it's like to live in such a remotely beautiful place, listen in. 

There will be 24 podcasts, and the project now extends through 2015.

Listen in to all the podcasts anytime at www.cmmayo.com/marfa

Check out the dedicated Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project Blog

Recent Marfa Mondays Podcasts include

+Cowboy Songs by Cowboys

+Mary Baxter, Painting the Landscape (no, she's not related to Dallas Baxter but they are friends)

+A Visit to Swan House

+Moonlight Gemstones

+A Spell in Chinati Hotsprings

... and more. Listen in any time, free, to all of them here.

COMMENTS? Always welcome.

Marfa, Capital of Quirkiness, on 60 Minutes

In a segment that aired on Sunday, "60 Minutes" calls Marfa, Texas "The Capital of Quirkiness." The sweetly artsy spirit of this remote small town of far West Texas was precisely what appealed to me when I first came across it more than a decade ago-- and what drew me to start writing a book and podcasting about it back in January 2012. But as I delved in, reading and traveling and interviewing a wide variety of artists, scientists, business people and others, I soon realized that there's a far larger, more complex story, or rather, stories, to tell about the Big Bend region. Start with the fact that the Spaniards called it the Despoblado (Empty Quarter), and on pre-20th century maps it appears only vaguely as "La Apachería..." It's one of the earth's "Thin Places," to steal an Irish term-- and with a frightening history, a starkly beautiful swirl of landscape, border country. . . Watch "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" for an idea of what it looks like.

So far, of the projected 24, I've posted 11 podcasts about the region. A few favorites:

Cowboy Songs by Cowboys

A Visit to Swan House

Mary Baxter, Painting the Big Bend

We Have Seen the Lights

Charles Angell in the Big Bend

Listen in to all the podcasts anytime at www.cmmayo.com/marfa

Next podcast: an in-depth interview with Dallas Baxter, founder of Cenizo Journal.

P.S. Follow my other blog, Marfa Mondays Blog, for updates about the podcasts, photos, videos, and more.

Comments

Boquillas is Big News for the Big Bend

After much rumor and anticipation, the Boquillas border crossing into Mexico from far West Texas's Rio Grande Village in the Big Bend National Park has just-- today-- thanks for the tip, Charlie Angell-- reopened for the first time since 9-11. This is one of the most remote places in the Lower 48, and in northern Mexico's state of Coahuila, and though the number of people crossing was always a mere trickle, the border's closing after 9-11 had devastated the Mexican town of Boquillas (which means "little mouths").

>Read more in the San Antonio Express-News

I'll have a lot to say about these remote areas of the US-Mexico border in my "Marfa Mondays" podcasts and in my work-in-progress about far West Texas. Recently I visited the remains of the  long demolished informal bridge over the Rio Grande at Candelaria. There was maybe 15 -20 feet across as I recollect, and I saw paw prints in the mud on both sides, going down from Mexico and coming up into Texas: a coyote, I mean canine, had crossed.

I'm also working on a podcast and an essay about the Big Bend National Park-- one of the most geologically varied and starkly beautiful places I have ever seen. Stay tuned.

Marfa Mondays Blog (New and Improved)

Now live on blogger.com, migrated from my website where it was rather unceremoniously parked:  Marfa Mondays blog, which is about my Marfa Mondays Podcasting Series which is apropos of a travel memoir-in-progress, World Waiting for a Dream: A Turn in Far West Texas. 

The blog consists of posts about the podcasts, other books, photos, and more about Marfa and environs-- that means the Big Bend.

OK, back to editing podcast #11.... Want an update? Click here to receive my free once-in-a-while newsletter.

Because of the plague of spam I've turned off the comments on my blogs but, as ever, I do warmly welcome your comments via email.

Marfa, Marfa & More Marfa

Oh, this country has such beyond splendid skies! Apropos of my book-in-progress, World Waiting for a Dream: A Turn in Far West Texas, I recently returned from my latest journey through Marfa, Van Horn, Presidio, Terlingua, and the Big Bend National Park, and will be posting scads more "Marfa Mondays" podcasts...

Pending: an interview with Enrique Madrid of Redford; interview with Dallas Baxter, ex-editor of Cenizo Journal; a journey up Pinto Canyon Rd and another up Casa Piedra Rd (a branch of the old Comanche war path); a visit to Cíbolo Creek Ranch, a trek (ayyy 3 hours each way, no shade) to the Apache Canyon and arrowhead quarry; and a bit about strange battle of Zapato Tuerto (Spanish vs Apaches); and yep, "Cowboy Is a Verb."

Oh, and more about the glorious Chisos and Spanish painter Xavier González.

>Listen in to the latest podcast, A Visit to Swan House
>The archive of all the "Marfa Mondays" podcasts  is here. Listen in anytime.

From Pinto Canyon Rd
www.cmmayo.com

Lone Cloud, Hotel Paisano, Marfa
www.cmmayo.com

Pinto Canyon Rd
www.cmmayo.com

Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center, Fort Davis
www.cmmayo.com

>Listen to the podcast with Chihuahuan Desert pollinator expert, Cynthia McAlister

Waiting at the Marfa Lights Viewing Station
www.cmmayo.com

>Listen to the podcast "We Have Seen the Lights" about the Marfa Lights

Near the Cubes, Marfa
www.cmmayo.com

Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West by Rubén Martínez

What is the West? That cross-borderly mashup of music, footwear and haberdashery known as “cowboy cool”? Or is it indigenous? The Big Empty, healing refuge, Hispano, Chicano, Mexicano? Or is it now found in the scrim of “underwater” water-sucking tract houses? What is this landscape, if not seen through millions of different eyes each with its own needs, lusts, filters and projections? And how is it changing? (Radically.) In Desert America Rubén Martínez tackles these immense and thorny questions in a narrative of multiple strands masterfully braided into a lyrical whole. . . 

CONTINUE reading C.M. Mayo's review in the Washington Independent Review of Books

Comments

World Waiting for a Dream, Reading for PEN San Miguel January 29

Pinto Canyon Rd, looking towards Mexico

I'm reading for PEN San Miguel in San Miguel de Allende this Tuesday January 29th @ 6pm, from work in progress, World Waiting for a Dream... Lots of good reasons for that title, but I'm really bamboozled about the subtitle.

1. Travels in the Big Bend?
2. Travels Far West Texas?
3. Travels in the Big Bend of Far West Texas?
4. Journey in the Big Bend of Borderlands Far West Texas?

ayy, blimey

Maybe right now... #4

Who's the guy in the photo? That's Charlie Angell, Big Bend expert and expedition guide. Don't go snerging around the Rio Grande without him. Listen in to my podcast interview with him here.

>Read more, and listen in anytime to the podcasts-- so far 9 out of 24-- at Marfa Mondays.
Including interviews with rock hound Paul Graybeal, desert pollinator expert Cynthia McAlister, artists Avram Dumitrescu and Mary Baxter, and more.

>More about the event here.

I will probably talk a bit about Cabeza de Vaca, the ghost lights, and glorious Swan House. Hope to see you there!

The Next Big Thing: A Bloggy Round Robin, from Karren Alenier to Yours Truly on World Waiting for a Dream

Karren Alenier

My amiga the DC-based poet and Gertrude Stein (and Paul & Jane Bowles) expert Karren Alenier tagged me for this blog round robin (I guess one could call it that), wherein one answers a set series of 10 questions about one's own work, then tags few more writers to carry on the following week.

>>Read Karren Alenier's blog post about her fascinating Next Big Thing, The Anima of Paul Bowles, here. (We almost coincided in Paul Bowles' workshop in Tangiers... she in 1982, me in 1983.)

And going back from there, check out previous blogger, Sammy Greenspan of Kattywompus Press, here.

This week, along with me, Karren Alenier tagged one of my favorite poets, Bernadette Geyer, who used her round robin to talk about her forthcoming book, The Scabbard of Her Throat.


Now for Yours Truly:

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing:

C.M. Mayo on Pinto Canyon Rd, south of Marfa, Texas

1. What is your working title of your book (or story)? 

World Waiting for a Dream: Travels in the Big Bend of Far West Texas

2. Where did the idea come from for the book? 

More than a decade ago I visited this jaw-dropping place and have yearned to explore and write about it ever since. Finally got around to it.

3. What genre does your book fall under? 

Travel memoir / creative nonfiction / literary journalism. 

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 

Tommy Lee Jones would have to make an appearance at some point. I wouldn't mind being played by Deanna Durbin bursting out in a rendition of "Grenada!" Just kidding. 

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? 

In-progress, starts with Cabeza de Vaca, the conquisitor who got lost (really), works its way through Comaches and Apaches, railroads, the Mexican Revolution, the arrival of the wizard of cubes aka Donald Judd, scads more about Mexico and Mexicans than one might expect, OMG the sky, and OMG the sky at night, meditations on dinosaurs, et voila. 

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 

Agency, but as I'm writing it I'm hosting a podcast series, Marfa Mondays: Exploring Marfa, Texas & Environs in 24 Podcasts 2012-2013. 

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? 

I'm not there yet. My goal is to finish the podcasts by the end of 2013 and then spend a year on the manuscript. 

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? 

It will be similar in structure and style to my previous travel memoir, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California the Other Mexico (Milkweed Editions). And that was modeled on a mashup of V.S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South, and works by various other travel writers / literary journalists, among them, Sara Mansfield Taber, Ted Conover, Bruce Chatwin, Ian Frazier, Robert Byron, and Alma Guillermoprieto. 

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

I was born in the furthest west of Far West Texas (that would be El Paso) and I wanted to write about this part of the country that, because I grew up in California, I don't know all that well, at but mainly, it was just a strong intuition that this book needs to be written. And I'm curious enough to stay with it for as long as it takes.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader's interest? 

Have a listen to some of the podcasts. Many are interviews with artists and/or about remote and beautiful places such as Chinati Hot Springs. The area is also famous for its ghost lights which were noted by the Apaches more than a century ago. 

>Complete list of "Marfa Mondays" podcasts.

Listen in anytime.

P.S. I'll be reading from the work-in-progress this January 29 for PEN San Miguel in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Tagging for next week:

---> Rose Mary Salum

PS I tagged Deborah Batterman, but she declined because she'd already been tagged! Read about her Next Big Thing, Dancing Into the Sun, here.

Mary Baxter, Painting the Big Bend

Just posted: My October 2012 interview with painter Mary Baxter about her luminous landscapes in her Marfa, Texas studio. This is #9 in the 24 podcast series, "Marfa Mondays."

>>Listen in here.

Mary Baxter came to Marfa years ago for the horses and cattle business and stayed to paint the sky-haunted landscapes. Recently returned to Marfa after a decade in (relatively nearby) Marathon, Texas, Mary Baxter talked to C.M. Mayo in her sun-filled studio in October 2012.

The Marfa Mondays podcasts are apropos of a work-in-progress about far West Texas.


Recent Marfa Mondays Podcasts include:

>A Spell in Chinati Hot Springs

>We Have Seen the Lights (about the Marfa ghost lights)

>Marfa's Moonlight Gemstones, an Interview with Paul Graybeal

>The Buzz on the Bees, an Interview with Cynthia McAlister

>Avram Dumitrescu, An Artist in Alpine

>Mary Bones on the Lost Art Colony

>Charles Angell in the Big Bend

>Ye Olde Introduction and Welcome

Read all about the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project here.

Not sure what a podcast is? Want to know why I'm doing this? Want to learn to make one yourself? Click here.

Comments

Cyberflanerie: From Mexico to Marfa, and a Bit About Mojo

One of the houses on the recent Marfa house tour featured this nifty "poster" by John Waters, "Visit Marfa." Turns out it's a rah-ther pry-say limited edi-shun. Check it out.

(What's up with the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project? Slow but sure... four more podcasts, including an interview with painter Mary Baxter, a tour of Swan House, and Exploring Pinto Canyon Rd, are in the works. The latest is "A Spell in Chinati Hot Springs." Listen in anytime. I recently did an article for Cenizo Journal on Swan House-- the visionary Nubian-style mud-roofed compound outside of Presidio, which is about an hour and a jog south of Marfa. Stay tuned for more about that.)

My amigas the poet, essayist and translator, Brandel France de Bravo, and Mexican writer Silvia Cuesy have beautiful websites, ¡felicidades!
www.brandelfrancedebravo.com
www.silviacuesy.com

Wouldn't it be bodacious to drive from Mexico to Marfa in the Mojo Car?
(Scroll on down that page for the hilarious FAQs.)

(You might be wondering how I happened to surf onto the Mojo Car page. It so happened that, as part on my reading to expand and revise the introduction to my translation of Francisco I. Madero's Spiritist Manual of 1911, I was reading Mitch Horowitz's excellent Occult America, which provides an overview of the many American traditions, from Spiritualism to Mormonism to hoodoo. Yes, hoodoo. So I was reading all about those African-American root doctors and mojo and I just had to go and google. Up came the Lucky Mojo Curio Company of California and the owner's Mojo Car. Read more about the true meaning of mojo -- which is probably not what you think, you Doors fans, you-- here.)

Marfa Mondays: A Spell at Chinati Hot Springs

Elvis. The private art gallery. Lithium. Best of all: no email. Listen in any time.
http://www.cmmayo.com/marfa/podcast-8-chinati-hot-springs.html

Fulgora's Illumination: works in neon and luminous glass by Aaron Ristau and Tony Greer, The Do Right Hall, Marfa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZsWwXvTpdA&feature=youtu.be

And three stills, screenshots from the video:

Literary Travel Writing Workshop on September 8th at the Writer's Center, Bethesda MD

Rainbow in Camp Denali, July 2012 (c) C.M. Mayo 2012

Take your travel writing to another level: the literary, which is to say, giving the reader the novelistic experience of actually traveling there with you. For both beginning and advanced writers, this workshop covers the techniques from fiction and poetry that you can apply to this specialized form of creative nonfiction for deliciously vivid effects. 

One day only, Sunday September 8 from 1 - 5 pm
The Writer's Center
4508 Walsh St
Bethesda MD (just outside Washington DC)
www.writer.org

About the instructor:
C.M. Mayo is the author of the novel The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, which was named a Library Journal Best Book of 2009. She is also the author of Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles Through Baja California, the Other Mexico, a travel memoir of Mexico's Baja Califorinia peninsula; and Sky over El Nido, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is the editor of a collection of Mexican literature in translation, Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion. For more about C.M. Mayo and her work, visit www.cmmayo.com.


>> For more information about this workshop and to register on-line click here.

We'll be looking at a variety of techniques, mainy from fiction and poetry, but one of the most basic for beginning a draft is simply noticing specific detail that appeals to the senses. From my notes from a recent journey to Alaska (you'll see it's not brain surgery):

Denali, of course. Spatulated lavender.
Other sights: 
receding moose; levering hind legs
polkadots of Dall sheep on green
3 blues of Wonder Lake

Heard:
eeee  eeee eeee
gravel underfoot
freeway roar of distant river

Smelled:
wet moss
drying socks
hot chocolate

Tasted:
cloudberry (spit the pip!)
Hoof N Woof honey (flowers of a season ago)
cinnamon gummy bear 

Felt:
unfriendly bear pelt
chocolatey-suave beaver pelt
sinking into spongy tundra mosses

Bright on the ground:
monk's hood; mushroom caps, sparkle of water

In the sky:
eagle; rainbow; moon

New to remember:
charismatic megafauna
braided river
Michio Hoshino's photographs and mini-essays



+ + + +

For further surfing:

>From the Workshop: Literary Travel Writing by C.M. Mayo, Writer's Carousel, Spring 2009

>Listen to my most recent Marfa Mondays podcast, "We Have Seen the Lights"

>Read some excerpts from my memoir, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico. 

>Recommended travel memoirs.

> Questions about this workshop? Just ask!

Marfa, Texas: What's Next?

Over at National Public Radio's website there's a brief article, Marfa Texas: An Unlikely Art Oasis in a desert Town" by  Neda Ulaby, and link to listen in to the Morning Edition show about Marfa, TX.

As for my own writing and podcasting project, "Marfa Mondays: Exploring Marfa, Texas & Environs in 24 Podcasts," though I'll be covering the fascinating and vibrant art scene there, I'm writing a book -- as yet untitled-- about the Big Bend region. Along the lines of my travel memoir of Mexico's Baja California peninsula, Miraculous Air, I'm delving into the natural, cultural, economic and political history, interviewing all variety of people, and venturing into both obvious and odd pockets of a mind-blogglingly huge area. Rather than write articles as I go (though I may still do that), I've been posting a podcast per month-- and will do so through the end of 2013.

So far (just click on the link to listen in):

Jan 2012 Welcome & Introduction

Feb 2012 Charles Angell in the Big Bend

Mar 2012 Mary Bones on the Lost Art Colony

April 2012 Avram Dumitrescu: An Artist in Alpine

May 2012 Cynthia McAlister: The Buzz on the Bees

June 2012 Marfa's Moonlight Gemstones

July 2012 We Have Seen the Lights (on the Marfa Lights)

What's next? It involves lithium and Elvis and a wee art gallery so remote you have to hike to get to it. Tune in on the 20th of this month. 

Just a few likely future topics: Apaches, Egyptian architecture, astrophysics, rock art, charismatic megafauna.

Want to be alerted when the next podcast is available? Free newsletter here.

Marfa Mondays #6: Marfa's Moonlight Gemstones

Now live: my podcast interview with Paul Graybeal, owner of Marfa's Moonlight Gemstones, the 6th is a series of 24 podcasts about Marfa, Texas and environs apropos of a book-in-progress (as yet untitled).

It was no exaggeration for historian Walter Prescott Webb to describe the Big Bend region as "an earthwreck in which a great section of country was shaken down, turned over, blown up, and set on fire." In short, there is ample evidence of millions of years of dramatic geological activity, with the craggiest of mountains to rocks of all kinds, from mammoth piles of boulders to pebbles. In this interview with Paul Graybeal, owner of Marfa's magnet for rock hounds, learn about agates, thundereggs, and more. 

>>CLICK HERE TO LISTEN NOW

Related links to surf:

Moonlight Gemstones

www.moonlightgemstones.com

The etsy.com video, "There's No Place Like Here: Marfa, Texas" 

in which Graybeal makes a brief appearance. 

About the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project:

www.cmmayo.com/marfa

Listen to more Marfa Mondays Podcasts

Geology of Big Bend National Park

On flybigbend's YouTube channel:

Flying over La Junta
Flying over El Solitario



http://www.cmmayo.com/marfa

Marfa Mondays Podcast #4: Avram Dumitrescu, An Artist in Alpine

The monthly Marfa Mondays podcast is live: an interview with Avram Dumitrescu, an artist whose paintings have been featured in "Marfans: Art from the Plateau" at the Nancy Fyfe Cardozier Gallery in Odessa, and also showcased in Cenizo Journal. A native of the Channel Islands and raised in Belfast, Dumitrescu earned a bachelor's degree and Masters in Applied Arts from the University of Ulster at Belfast. He is married to journalist Megan Wilde. For more about Dumitrescu, and to view his portfolio, visit www.onlineavram.com.

Recorded in late January 2012. (About 36 minutes)

>>Click here to listen in.

Marfa Mondays Podcast #3: Mary Bones on the Lost Art Colony

Just posted: the third podcast in the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project 2012-2013:

>> Click here to listen in


Yours Truly interviews Mary Bones, curator of the exhibit "The Lost Colony: Texas Regionalist Paintings," in the Museum of the Big Bend, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas.

The Lost Colony refers to the summer art colony at Sul Ross which began in 1932 and ended somewhat mysteriously in 1950. Alpine is 30 minutes northeast of Marfa-- right next door. Of the region, as Michael Duty writes in the introduction to the exhibit's catalog, "It... has long called to artists who have been captivated by its natural beauty, its history, and its people. In recent times, the area has also drawn the attention of writers and reporters who have written numerous articles touting the area's prominence as something of a center, albeit a far flung one, for contemporary art. Those articles focus primarily on Marfa and the influence that minimalist sculptor Donald Judd has had on the town..." Later, Duty adds, that Judd "was certainly not the first artist to be so captivated".

Mary Bones explains the inspiration for the exhibit, and shares the stories about and friendships of some of the painters, in particular Texan Julius Woeltz and his teacher Xavier González, a native of Spain, both of whom made trips to Mexico City to study the Mexican muralists, including Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco.

Some of the other painters discussed are Mabel Vandiver, Anna Keener, Elizabeth Keefer, Coreen Mary Spellman, Harry Anthony De Young, Beatrice Cuming, Otis Dozier, William Lester, James Swann, Ethel Edwards, Alice Reynolds, and Juanita Montgomery. Several of these paintings can be seen in the article by Mary Bones, "The Lost Colony: Texas Regionalist Paintings - Rediscovering an Artistic Past," Cenizo Journal, 4th Quarter 2011.

>>Previous Marfa Mondays podcast: Charles Angell in the Big Bend.

>>For more Marfa Mondays podcasts, and to read about the project, please visit www.cmmayo.com/marfa

Guest-blogger Peter Behrens on 4 Canadian and 1 Irish Writers You Must Read

St Patrick's Day edition! My guest-blogger today is my Yaddo and VCCA amigo, Peter Behrens, whose most recent novel is The O'Briens (Pantheon, March 2012), which has been garnering glowing reviews as he takes it on a coast-to-coast tour. Behrens is also the author of the historical novel The Law of Dreams, and he blogs about trucks, cars, highways, aesthetics, and good writing at autoliterate. Where does he get his inspiration? Maybe it's from hanging out part of the year under the starry skies of Marfa, Texas. The New York Times recently profiled Behrens and his family in A Moth to Marfa's Flame: At Home with Peter Behrens by Penelope Green, along with a slide show, A Winter Home in the West Texas Desert. That said, the best novelists always draw inspiration from other novelists; here are five Behrens recommends.

Four Canadian and 1 Irish Writers You Must Read
By Peter Behrens

Alistair Macleod. His novel No Great Mischief won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1999. The novel is superb but the best of his short stories are transcendant. They were originally published in 2 collections: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun. (The 2 volumes were collected and published in the United States as ISLAND in 2000. There are any number of Checkhov-calibre Macleod stories: two of my favorites are "Vision", and "The Closing Down of Summer". "The Tuning of Perfection" belongs right up there as well. Macleod was born in Saskatchewan, into a family of expatriate Nova Scotians. They soon returned to NS, and MacLeod grew up in Inverness County, on Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island. The culture he grew up within was shaped by Catholic Highlanders and Islandmen who emigrated from Scotland in the middle of the 19th century. It's a world much involved with the sea, and with fishing and coal mining; where Scottish Gaelic is still a common language (more common on Cape Breton than in Scotland, in fact.) The ancient world infuses Macleod's stories, but they are anything but quaint, sentimental, or bucolic. The stories operate like novels: they contain worlds; they are often open-ended. They resonate.


Joseph Boyden so far has published two remarkable novels, Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce. Three Day Road is about Cree solidiers serving in the Canadian Army during WWI. Through Black Spruce which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2008. It's protagonst is a legendary bush pilot, son of one of the characters in the first novel. Boyden has Mètis heritage and his characters come out of that rich, impoverished, complex northern world of mixed race and mixed identity. Sometimes they choose between the northern world and the world "away"; sometimes the choice is made for them. They engage with the history of their time. This guy knows how to write. Beautiful sharp sentences.

Alice Munro. Why hasn't this writer won the Nobel Prize? Call me paranoid, but could it be because she's Canadian? Canada is too safe, white, and familiar to be exotic, but does not have the heft and presence on the international literary stage that say the US, Britain, and France do. There has been a spectacular "naissance" (as opposed to renaissance) of Canadian literature in English over the last twenty-five years, and I believe that the clear, weird, dangerous, beautifully constructed, and deceptively simple Munro stories that over the last four decades have been appearing in The New Yorker and in collections like Lives of Girls and Women, The Moons of Jupiter, and The Progress of Love are part of the reason why. The best Munro stories operate as very dense, very rich, compact novels. Nothing gets tied up neatly. Try her story "The Albanian Virgin", for example. Nobel judges please sit up and take notice: there are few writers who have created such a brilliant body of work over a long career. The title of her 2001 collection was Hateship Courtship Friendship Loveship Marriage but Munro's no miniaturist: her themes are the major ones.

Clark Blaise Blaise is finally getting (overdue) attention this year, thanks to the success of his recent story collection, The Meagre Tarmac. I'm happy to consider Blaise a Canadian writer even though he was born in North Dakota, attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop (during the illustrious Ray Carver era), and has lived and taught in the United States for most of his life. His parents were both Canadians, from opposite sides of the cultural divide (English/French; Western/Quebecois; middle class/not middle class). Blaise grew up mostly in the Deep South, and in the Midwest, where his French Canadian father, Leo Blais, recreated himself as Lee Blaise, furniture salesman extraordinaire. Clark Blaise lived and taught in Montreal for a ten-year period, and that era produced some of his most remarkable fictions: (the stories in Tribal Justice, for example) I think Blaise found the city a perfect setting for stories that sift through the complexities of identity, heritage, the immigration experience, and the power and style of family myth. I wrote an introduction to his collection Montreal Stories. Blaise is married to the American novelist Bharati Mukherjee and has long been familiar with Indian expatriate culture in North America: the world of middle class Indian professionals is the universe he explores with deftness and panache in The Meagre Tarmac.

John McGahern Okay here's the Irish corner of my post. For me, McGahern's novel Amongst Women is about as perfect as a novel gets. McGahern is mostly known as a short story writer, and the stories are brilliant, but Amongst Women seems to draw deeply from the well of family background, and it is perfectly constructed and intense. A slender volume, it makes a reader realize that other novelists--particularly contemporary American male novelists--ought to think about leaving a lot more out of their tomes. McGahern's Irish men and women, in the hinterlands of Counties Monaghan and Roscommon, usually in the 1950s, live with ghosts and echoes and silences. His portrait of the father in Amongst Women--a bitter old man, once a rebel and a gunman--is stinging and humane. I haven't read his memoir, All Will be Well, but I'm going to.

-- Peter Behrens

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UPDATE:
Peter Behren's St Patrick's Day op-ed for the New York Times, "It's About Immigrants, Not Irishness"
The O'Briens on National Public Radio
Marfa Public Radio: Talk at Ten interview with Peter Behrens


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---> For the complete archive of Madam Mayo guest-blog posts, click here.
Recent posts include translator Harry Morales on Gregory Rabassa's 90th Birthday; Steve Sando on 5 Beans You're Not Eating; and novelist Andrew Dayton on 5 Books to Get Your Head Inside Iran. Last year's St Patrick's Day edition was Michael Hogan on the Irish soldiers of Mexico.