A Birthday in the Desert
The rain started before dawn—a pounding bitter cold downpour—so Pastor Galván and I decided to forego the pig roast. Therefore, the huge El Chino got to live for at least another week.
It was January 30, my birthday and many months ago the patients at Vision in Action, Galván’s mental asylum in Juárez had promised me a fiesta and pig roast in celebration. Although I have no interest in birthday celebrations, this was a gesture of kindness that I couldn’t resist. I mentioned it to a number of friends and many showed up, but I was very concerned as to how they would react...
The Lost Poets of the Russian Revolution
I have always loved poetry, its power and resonance in the human heart; and I have always had an affinity for the Russian poets, especially those of the October Revolution of 1917, how they used their words to further that revolution.
My meager study is cursory at best, a mere dip in a great sea of verse. Yet, it might whet your appetite to explore further, as Russian poetry holds a unique place in literature. As Joseph Brodsky says in his essay on Osip Mendelstam, “For those raised in the English-speaking world, it is difficult to comprehend that Russian poets have long had a political status as great as that as more public figures and that Russian poetry frequently has a political impact.”...
Yucatán Journey, Part II: Where poison and antidote are seldom far apart
This is the second and final column about a Yucatán journey. Read Part 1 here.
We traveled around Yucatán exclusively by public bus, which does have the advantage of giving you lots of idle time to study the people and countryside. Everybody has their own opinions on when and where the buses run, so you have to be resigned to long waits and occasional dead ends. Even though the distances in Yucatán are modest by U.S. standards, it takes a day or two to get just about anywhere by bus...
Goodbye, Tony
Albuquerque, New Mexico, the world of justice, and poetry lost E. A. “Tony” Mares just after noon on January 30, 2015. Tony was gentle and kind but tough and righteous when the situation called for those qualities. With deep roots in this land and its people, his scholarship extended to Spain and Mexico in search of early events and figures of relevance; and showed up in his prolific poetry, articles, and in the memories of generations of grateful students...
Yucatán Journey, Part I: The most beautiful beach in the world
On a warm, bright morning, with high white clouds scudding over the dense tropical forest, four Frenchmen, four Germans, a Dutch couple, an American couple and three Mayas, jabbering in half a dozen languages, including Spanish and Yucatec, puttered slowly down a canal dug 1,500 years ago by residents of the Mayan city of Muyil.
For centuries their descendants stubbornly fought off the Spanish and Mexican governments with the result that the canal is still there and so are the Maya, as well as the magnificent ruins of their old city. Soaring above the jungle panoply, it is a victory over time and endless tribulations...
Play Illustrates Idealism vs Reality in American Corporatocracy
“What laws ever made men free?” Henry David Thoreau asks in The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, a thoughtful new production at the Adobe Theater in Albuquerque. If his question has more than a passing resemblance to the rhetoric of the Tea Party 170 years later, the parallels deserve close examination.
I have published a detailed review of this brilliantly acted and skillfully directed play on talkinbroadway.com and won’t repeat that here, but I do want to discuss further the idea of freedom that is the core of this play—and of much of the political debate in the U.S. today...
Mercury Poetry: The woods eat war and forget it
The metal jackets of bullets
rust in the dark river
beyond the weaving grass.
Lightning bugs rise up
in their landscape gaping
with old graves overgrown.
Tractor guts rot and ripped
up soil becomes nutritious...
Five Questions for New Mexico Authors – Benjamin Radford
This week we ask author, researcher, and editor Benjamin Radford about his new nonfiction work, Mysterious New Mexico: Miracles, Magic, and Monsters in the Land of Enchantment, published by the University of New Mexico Press. Radford is the deputy editor of the must-read Skeptical Inquirer science magazine.
New Mexico Mercury: I know you must be a skeptical inquirer yourself. But what first drew you to investigating old New Mexico mysteries like the haunted KiMo theater and the real-world crime scene of a serial killer on Albuquerque’s West Mesa?...
Thank you
As the year comes to an end, the fate of immigration reform remains stuck in a bitter political impasse and faces an uncertain future. Nonetheless, there are many individuals and organizations here in New Mexico that are deeply committed to bridging the gap between the United States and Mexico. I would like to say a year-end thank you to three that I’ve worked with that are located in Santa Fe...
When fiction meets life: “Last Night of Ballyhoo”
On Saturday night, I sat in an Albuquerque theater as actors discussed the hospital in which I was born, the street on which I lived, the store that my father managed—and it was all transpiring in my native city within eight months of my birth. As assimilated, non-practicing, non-believing Jews living in a city notorious for earlier incidents of antisemitism, my family could have been the subject of this play—except for the fact that unlike the play’s characters, my family never discussed Judaism. For two hours, the parallel tracks of fiction and life did indeed seem to meet, even if in the far distance.
Such was the moving but rather unnerving experience I had watching Last Night of Ballyhoo, an effective and affecting comedy being staged by Mother Road at the Tricklock Performance Laboratory...