There is also a transcript of my podcast interview with Rose Mary Salum.
More podcasts and transcripts of same are in-progress-- coming soon, more Marfa Mondays.
> Your COMMENTS are always welcome.
Showing posts with label Sergio Troncoso. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sergio Troncoso. Show all posts
Sergio Troncoso on El Paso, Flannery O'Connor, Borges at Harvard, Zyklon-B, and Our Lost Border
There is also a transcript of my podcast interview with Rose Mary Salum.
More podcasts and transcripts of same are in-progress-- coming soon, more Marfa Mondays.
> Your COMMENTS are always welcome.
Reviewed in LITERAL: Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso
>More book reviews by Yours Truly
>Recommended books on Mexico
>Comments?
Cyberflanerie: Newsletter, Mechanical Turk, Rose Mary Salum, Zack Rogow, William Kiesel on Occult of Personality, Agustin Cadena
The photo is from Pinto Canyon Rd, a lonely but gorgeous drive from Marfa (right behind Paul Graybeal's Moonlight Gemstones shop) down to the Rio Grande, where, should you feel so moved, you could chuck a baseball into Mexico.
Cyberflanerie du jour:
An article on the Mechanical Turk (an oldie but goodie from Salon.com)
The future is looking mighty strange...
Rose Mary Salum does the Next Big Thing Round Robin
A Mexican writer, translator and editor of Literal Magazine, one of the finest bilingual literary journals ever
New over on the blogroll (look right) Zack Rogow's excellent "Advice for Writers"
Occult of Personality interview with William Kiesel of Ouroboros Press
The book as talisman and much more. And another, with more on talismanic publishing and the Library Angel
I am intrigued by what Kiesel is doing with Ouroboros Press. I sense that publishing is diverging, sharply, into 2 streams: artisanal publishing (what he does, but I would include some ebooks in this category) and mass market ebooks. And I think we're going to see a galloping development in both over the next few years. On that note, Agustin Cadena, one of my favorite and most prolific Mexican writers-- and my translator-- has just published his new novel, Maljuna Knabino, as a Kindle. This, seriously, is a big deal on the Mexican publishing scene. And I find that interesting because I live in Mexico, I write about Mexico and I translate Mexican writers-- but it's also interesting because Mexico is a leading emerging market. As goes Mexico, so goes the emerging world-- Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and so on.... Right now its digital marketplace is underdeveloped. Most Mexicans still get their books at Sanborns (a nationwide chain that might be described as a cross between Denny's and Walgreen's). Translation: huge potential. And the ebook market is going to develop-- I mean to say Mexican readers will start using iPads and Kindle and Kindle apps--- why just look at all the urban and suburban Mexican (mostly) middle class kids from Tijuana to Merida. They're all texting each other and facebooking with the ease of breathing itself. And I do believe every Mexican congress critter maintains a Twitter account. Watch the audience when (even) the President speaks to any urban business audience under the age of 60-- they're all looking at their laps. So when people say (and alas many Mexicans insist) that Mexican readers won't adapt to ebooks, I say, hooey. More about all this in the next post.
Comments? Please feel free to email me.
Top 10+ Books Read in 2012
Lyrical, original, and profound. At once a memoir, a piece of American history, and an examination of the question, what does it mean to be American?
>Listen to my podcast interview with the author here.
2. Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
>Read my talk at Bellas Artes in Mexico City about this splendid book.
3. A tie! (Who says I have to decide?)
Natalie Dykstra's Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life
One of those rare novelesque biographies that can change the way one thinks about a whole country, a whole century, and certainly about one city: Washington DC. Out of five stars I give this six, lit up in flashing neon.
>View Clover Adams' photo album at the Massachusetts Historical Society
Janet Wallach's Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia
Natalie Dykstra's Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life
One of those rare novelesque biographies that can change the way one thinks about a whole country, a whole century, and certainly about one city: Washington DC. Out of five stars I give this six, lit up in flashing neon.
>View Clover Adams' photo album at the Massachusetts Historical Society
Janet Wallach's Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia
The life of a priviledged Englishwoman whose curiosity fired with boldness changed the world. Alas she was less apt in love and bureaucratic shenanigans. Fascinating reading. When I came to the end, which was too sad, I went to Egypt and rode a camel.
4. Bruce Jackson's The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories
5. Lonn Taylor's Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy
Though a collection of columns as "The Rambling Boy" for the Big Bend Sentinel, this is far from the usual mashed potatoes newspaper fare. Taylor is a wise and lyrical writer with a background as a professional historian and his mammoth love for Texas is infectious. This is a book to savor in a rocking chair on a hot day with a tall glass of spiked lemonade at your side. Get ready to howl with the one about the in-law aunts's oodles of poodles.
6. Rubén Martínez's Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old WestThough a collection of columns as "The Rambling Boy" for the Big Bend Sentinel, this is far from the usual mashed potatoes newspaper fare. Taylor is a wise and lyrical writer with a background as a professional historian and his mammoth love for Texas is infectious. This is a book to savor in a rocking chair on a hot day with a tall glass of spiked lemonade at your side. Get ready to howl with the one about the in-law aunts's oodles of poodles.
Another kind of Texas-- and New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
> Read my review of this book in the Washington Independent Review of Books
7. Ruth Levy Guyer's A Life Interrupted: The Long Night of Marjorie Day
>Read my mini-review of this exceedingly strange story and how I happened upon it here.
8. Mitch Horowitz's Occult America: White House Seances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret History of Our Nation
So what am I doing reading about the occult? I've spent much of this year reading and researching for an expanded and revised introduction to my translation-- the first into English-- of Francisco I. Madero's secret book of 1911, Spiritist Manual (a work vital for understanding the Mexican Revolution of 1910 since Madero, a Spiritist medium, was its leader). Earlier I'd seen Occult America but didn't pick it up because I (wrongly) assumed it was a bit of trade sensationalism. Then, on the Occult of Personality podcasts, I happened to listen to an interview with the author about the Theosophist Colonel Henry Steel Olcott's profound influence on the revival of Buddhism in 19th century Sri Lanka. Start reading the literature on the occult and very soon one will appreciate, as water in the desert, an author who is at once knowledgable, objective, and articulate. Of course I immediately ordered the book. It's a masterwork of scholarship. Dear Mr Horowitz, if I had a Ouija board, I would salute you with it.>Occult of Personality Occult America interview 1 (Publick Universal Friend et al)
>Occult of Personality Occult America interview 2 (Joseph Smith, Edgar Cayce, et al)
>Occult of Personality 48 (Life and Work of Henry Steel Olcutt)
>Mitch Horowitz's website
9. Sergio Troncoso's Crossing Borders: Personal Essays and novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust
>Listen to my interview with the author here
The superbly told true and head scratcher of a story.
>Author's website with link to mini-doc on the man.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + +
Of note, two crucial works on Mexico's second Empire were published this year:
*El ocaso del imperio de Maximiliano visto por un diplomatico prusiano: Los informes de Anton von Magus a Otto von Bismarck, 1866-1867, Edited by Konrad Ratz.
*Los viajes de Maximiliano en México (1864-1867), By Konrad Ratz and Amparo Gómez Tepexicuapan
+ + + + + + + + + + + + +
Over at Work-in-Progress, my amiga the novelist, short story writer and essayist Leslie Pietrzyk shares her list of top books read / reread in 2012, which, if you've been following her excellent blog, unsurprisingly starts with ye olde Great Gatsby. Which is, seriously, a masterpiece.
Alas, nothing on our lists coincides. This is why, in writing workshops, when we get to plot, I resort to discussing movies. Now if you haven't seen The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, Gone with the Wind or Gladiator, GHY. But plot in a movie compares to plot in a novel as cement blocks to fine woodwork.
So I just noticed I didn't read any novels this year. Oh well! I'm writing another travel memoir, that's why it's heavy on Texas and the West.
Sergio Troncoso's From This Wicked Patch of Earth and Crossing Borders
¡¡Viva!!
Read my review of these two books for Literal Magazine.
Listen in to my conversation with Sergio about these two books on the Conversations with Other Writers podcasting series:
--> LISTEN NOW
A Conversation with Sergio Troncoso, Author of From This Wicked Patch of Dust
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.
Sergio Troncoso's From This Wicked Patch of Dust and Cross Borders: Personal Essays
(Arte Público Press, 2011)
(University of Arizona Press, 2011)
Este maldito terregal, this wicked patch of dust, is what SergioTronoco’s mother called Ysleta, their barrio in El Paso, Texas, and from this he takes the titles of his new novel and an essay which is included in the collection, Crossing Borders, both published in 2011.
Ranging from several lengthy and intimately personal essays about family, to lessons in literary politics, to a passel of posts from his blog, Chico Lingo, Crossing Borders provides a rich introduction to not only Tronoco’s new novel, but also his previous work, which includes the novel The Nature of Truth (Northwestern University Press, 2003), and the short story collection, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories (University of Arizona Press, 1999), which won the Premio Aztlán for the best new book by a new Mexican-American writer.
Troncoso’s work, by his own admission, is not easy. In “Literature and Migration,” he states his position plainly:“Against much of popular American fiction, my stories are not primarily to entertain the reader, but to unmoor him. I want the reader to face through my characters perhaps what he will not face himself.”Though born the son of Mexican immigrants in a hardscrabble border barrio, and brought up Catholic, he was educated at Harvard and Yale and went on to marry a Jewish classmate who has since made a successful career in banking. Today they and their two boys, Aaron and Isaac, live in a doorman building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a world as exotic to Ysleta and Ysleta is to it. If the role of the writer is, as Tronoco argues, to be an outsider, his perch is priviledged indeed, for it has not always been easy to find his way in the northeast, nor, for all his experiences and Ivy League education, to revisit his childhood home. “On good days I feel I am a bridge,” writes Troncoso. “On bad days I just feel alone.”
There were some bad days during his tenure on the board of the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, which he recounts in the essay “Apostate of my Literary Family.” Not to be confused with the unrelated Bethesda, Maryland-based Writer’s Center, the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center is a short train ride from Manhattan into the tony Westchester subsurbs. Initially, Troncoso felt disrespected and treated as token Latino. He tired of “having to endlessly explain issues of literature to those who were not writers, [and] justifying the importance of Latino writers to those who did not read much literature (Latino or otherwise).” But in the end, he learned a valuable lesson: “whether, and when, to submlimate or redirect instinctual personal reactions into socially acceptable points of view and arguments. Perhaps this is a function of any family, to convert its members into socially funcional human beings.”
Family is the subject of most of the other essays, which include a trio of letters to his sons about their mother Laura’s terrifying and brutal struggle with breast cancer. Though clearly set in turn- of- the-21st century Manhattan, there is a timelessness to the story. The reader can imagine the two boys, once grown, and again, when they too have young children, and then again, decades later when their parents are elderly or perhaps no longer living, reading and rereading, mining ever richer veins of meaning in these heartfelt letters from their father. Laura survives and her husband writes, “We have more days and do not waste them. We do posses an eternal wound in a way, a wound that reminds us of the rarity and fragility of life. Our quotidian fantasy is now a new quotidian reality: vividly colorful days, days of curiosity, days bereft of many useless fears and petty ambitions, these days of wonder.”
The magnet of family flung into in a cultural, economic, political, religious, and geographic centrifuge is the focus of the novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust, which opens with Mexican immigrant Pilar and her husband Cuauhtémoc’s travails in building a house in the as-yet-unwired desert barrio of Ysleta in the summer of 1966. A dozen years later, their daughter Julia, a UTEP undergrad, is traveling through Italy, having spent the summer as a Spanish translator for the Sisters of Perpetual Charity. Meanwhile, in Ysleta, her parents listen to their old friend Carlos play Mexican love songs on the guitar, while the kids escape to another room to watch Charlie’s Angels. The centrifuge accelerates. Ismael, class valedictorian, earns a scholarship to the Blair Summer School for Journalism in New Jersey, while Julia, with a group from the Mexican-American Cultural Center, has traveled to Nicaragua, and taken a sharp turn to the left into liberation theology. “Mamá y Papá,” Julia writes, “do not be surprised if this letter has been read by someone in the post office in Ysleta or even by the FBI or CIA.”
Ismael goes to Harvard and finds a Jewish bride; Julia to Minnesota and a conversion to Islam. In late 2011, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Ismael is in New York when his sister, now married and living in Tehran, calls to see how he is. Their conversation is so well-grounded in knowing detail that Troncoso makes what might seem fantastic, a brother and sister so far from Ysleta and so impossibly far from one another, both believable and moving.
Five years later, after the loss of a beloved brother who was serving in Iraq, Ismael, a writer now, presents their mother with a story, a narrative Ouroboros. “It’s about Ysleta. It’s about how we lived, how we tried. It’s about how we were together for a time.”
In the final essay in his collection, “Why Should Latinos Write Their Own Stories?” Tronocoso answers, “to define ourselves,” and “to challenge ourselves.” In his novel, he has done this brilliantly.
-- C.M. Mayo
--Reprinted by permission of Literal Magazine. All rights reserved.
---> Read more of my book reviews here.
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