Until the day breaks and the shadows flee away, I will go my way to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of frankincense. -Song of Solomon Summer day of bougainvillea, wild poinsettia and swaying jacarandas – carefree, carefree – a dry wind carried the restless spirit of the future on its back, fanned by strange […]
Continue Reading
The wave of media excitement generated in 2009 by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño was on a par with the announcement of a new Britney Spears release, even if up until that moment little was really known about him. Bolaño, who succumbed to liver failure in 2003 at the age of 50 while residing in […]
Continue Reading
Poets have always intrigued me. Sensitive and observant about the world around them, they are an eclectic blend of artist, philosopher and dreamer and are too often underappreciated during their lifetimes. Several years ago, I was rummaging through a box of family photos with my dad, when he showed me an old, yellowing image of […]
Continue ReadingCarlos Fuentes was an internationalist from birth. Though one of Mexico’s best-known citizens, he was born on November 11, 1928, in Panama, where his father represented the Mexican government. Mexico played only a minor role in his early childhood, most of which was spent in Washington, DC. He also lived in Chile and Argentina. In […]
Continue Reading1998 witnessed the passing of such diverse figures as Frank Sinatra, legendary boxer Archie Moore, two-term Florida Governor Lawton Chiles, cowboy star and entrepreneur Gene Autry, and Clayton (“Peg Leg”) Bates, the one-legged tap dancer who was so skilled with a wooden limb that he forged a career (including twenty appearances on the Ed Sullivan […]
Continue ReadingIn the darkest days of the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill said of the RAF that “never has so much been owed by so many to so few.” To paraphrase the great statesman, it could be said of the Juan Rulfo’s literary output that never has such a small body of work been so widely […]
Continue ReadingWhere does one draw the line between iconoclastic satire and cynicism? It is commonly said that the purpose of satire is correction and this seems as useful an explanation as any. No matter how brutally a target is lampooned, the satirist usually has a vision of a better world created through a necessary process of […]
Continue Reading
The area’s reputation was considerably enhanced in the 1930s, ’40s and’ 50s by a long string of visiting writers and artists, many of whom settled permanently in the string of villages along the northern shore of the lake. This brief alphabetical listing of some of the stalwarts of the Lake Chapala art and literary scene […]
Continue ReadingThe legend of Crecencio is often told by the people of Teotitlan del Valle. Crecencio arrived there as a peon that helped raise cattle and domesticated animals in the community. The years went by and in those times people had to collect tree bark to cure leather. In those days the tanner’s work was highly […]
Continue Reading
In the preface to his monumental biography Sor Juana, the late Octavio Paz wrote, “In her lifetime [1651 to 1695], Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was read and admired not only in Mexico but in Spain and all the countries where Spanish and Portuguese were spoken. Then for nearly two hundred years her works […]
Continue Reading