Photos from my friend the intrepid traveler, Elvia Contreras. She and her grand-niece went to Portugal and the photos are as lovely as I have always been told Portugal is.

Elvia on the Tajo River, looking intrepid!

Here is lovely Pia, Pia Solorzano Contreras, also on the famous Tajo bridge. I remember visiting her mother, Mariana, and dad, Chuy (Jesus) when they lived in Veracruz, and after dinner Pia sat down at the piano and played an enchanting Mozart piece and as I watched she missed a note and gave that little furious shake of the head that musicians or singers do when they flub a note, I have done it many a time, but she raced on (it was a fast selection) and finished in good style. She’s now studying in Puebla but took time to accompany her great-Aunt Elvia to Portugal.

Scenes from travel in Lisboa — a library of course!

With a flying girl on a bicycle in the upper left.

Another library, this time in a converted church. Both in Lisboa.

Here are houses in Oporto, it all seems undeveloped, un-modernized, organic… maybe this is why people fall in love with Portugal. Elvia said she liked Oporto more than Lisboa.

The medieval city Obidos, with its ancient defensive wall still standing. When I think about it, Portugal remained neutral during World War II and so these ancient towns never got bombed flat into smoking ruins like so many places in Italy, Germany, France. England.

More in the next few days! I am working at the new far-future fantasy novel and taking care of Jackson’s slowly-healing wounds, our music group played in church last Sunday (yesterday) for the first time in a long time, Sid Fly was with us, such a great performer! and Tom our fiddler, Kathy, Diane… I asked Sid if he and Kathy were cousins and they immediately made kissing noises at each other. Kissin’ cousins, get it?

It takes a great leap of faith for a reader to enter into a fantasy, purely imaginative world, at the present time because of the endless excitement of the news feeds. They can’t let go. This book will end up unread and dead I am afraid but who knows. I may published the first few chapters on this blog.

An interesting find

My cousin sent me an old Missouri Historical Review from a treasure trove of them I think she found in a thrift shop, and in it is an article on a scholar named T.K. Whipple(1890 – 1939), whose observations on literature were obviously well-known to Larry McMurtry because he quoted him as an epigraph in the opening pages of Lonesome Dove.

“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live and what they lived, we dream.”

Article by Lewis O. Saum, Missouri Historical Review 2005.

He died at a youngish age, of cancer, after having fought in WWI and graduated from Princeton with a PhD. He was caught up in that ancient argument about the novel, should it be representational or should it be only imaginative? Of course as Northrop Frye said, any artistic creation point to something outside itself but is the primary purpose to provide accurate reportage? This has no relevance to the fantasy/science fiction genres but even in those readers are quick to notice if an event is plausible or impossible. When 1984 was first published there was no separate category for science-fiction.

His arguments were drowned in the then-media hype about Sherwood Anderson and Willa Cather, slice -of-life taken from the supposedly dismal societies of small towns and supposedly small minds, always with a main character who “escapes”. who “longs for the urban scene” and so on. These novels were inevitably praised for their realism.

In Study Out the Land he wrote “Why do we apply to literature a criterion which we have long since outgrown in the other arts? The novel has become akin to the group photograph. Having looked first for ourselves and having surmounted indignation, we look for our neighbors and fellow lodge members…(but) literature involves creation.”

He was a friend of Edmund Wilson and H.L. Menken, for all that.

More photos from the Yucatan trip and news of Jackson is that he is slowly getting better. His care is really exhausting so I put him at the vet’s in Bandera for boarding and care until Tuesday.

Elvia in heaven Elvia is truly a bookworm and is enormously well-read. This is the Ghandi bookstore in Cancun, and I am amazed and encouraged by the amount of books of all genres, plus translations of the classics that were there.

Ghandi Books has also started its own imprint, I think they are using print-on-demand, but this encourages Spanish-speaking authors and I hope sparks new novels, new books of poetry!

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At a restored old hacienda near Merida

Me at the Tren Maya station in Merida

Old and new!

too much happening!

A wonderful ten days in Yucatan with friend Elvia, and then home to a visit from my very favorite niece Denise and her husband and daughter and grandkids, and then no rest for me as Jackson my palomino got into a cattle chute and was very seriously injured and now requires a lot of daily care, bandaging, getting meds down him, cold-spraying injuries and so on and so on. I am going to call Bandera Vets to see if they will take him as a patient-care case for a week to give me a rest. It’s just more than I can do.

Plus! tomcat DT got mauled by a dog and had to have his tail amputated. He is now a bobcat. That took a lot of back and forth to the vets, which is 30 miles away over mountain roads. I am actually trying to write a book. From time to time.

Family — Denise and Scott, Ambril and kids

And not least my problem child Jackson the playful, idiotic but gentle palomino who got himself into a cattle chute. If We can keep the infection down he may make it.

December 21/24

From now on the days get longer.

As a sign of things to come, when I went to the Organic Farm to get my eggs I found these carrots in the refrigerator, looking sunny, looking tropical, looking delicious. It’s a pay-on-the-honor system so I weighed them in at just over a pound, left my money and fled with my loot.

My tomcat got mauled by a dog and returned home with modest little meows as if nothing was really all that wrong, but I took him to the vets’ 30 miles away and he needed sixteen stitches and after a few days at home it was obvious that his tail was broken, and it was not healing, so it had to be amputated. It’s been hairy. The situation, not the tail. The tail is no more. He was on sedatives for the last week and is finally better but not allowed to go out despite his unearthly howling. He’s upstairs here in the study watching the birds at the birdfeeder. Sleeping. Grumbling. God I hope that tail stub looks better after the hair grows out, as it is… it looks like…never mind. I refuse to take a picture of it.

It’s solstice and the sun comes through my windows in a different angle, shining through the slatted screen around my bed, it is far to the south and makes a sun-pattern like a palm-leaf of light.

This was the West Virginia.

Cold weather, wounded cat, water-gun warrioress

Poor DT lost a fight — stitches, broken tailbone, probably bruised all over but you can’t see it because of the fur. Three days at the vet’s, the horrible Cone of Shame collar and locked into the guest room for recovery. There have been two stray dogs wandering this part of the mountain, seeking whom they may devour and they just about did for DT. So I went and bought a ‘paintball’ gun (it actually shoots water pellets) and it took me FOREVER to learn how to put it together.

It looks very outer-space. Hopefully if I see them I can approach them sneakily and blast them with my interplanetary deadly-water weapon and maybe they’ll go somewhere else. If not, more serious measures ensue. This goes for coons, squirrels stealing all the black-oil sunflower seed etc.

What to read? I am ordering The Iliad. I have never read it. Have read The Odyssey several times over.

Cold weather has arrived; 50 degrees today and down to low 40s at night. So looking forward to the Tren Maya trip.

In Mexico, all those graduating from Mexican universities in the profession must spend a year in a remote village practicing — including doctors, vets, dentists, teachers, etc. Elvia’ s niece Danielle, who just graduated in dentistry, just finished her year in a very small village and here are Elvia’s memories of her ‘year of service’ and I found it so lively and interesting I included it in today’s post.

“I went last weekend to my generation party(I don’t know the word in English) in Orizaba,, a very nice city not far from Coatepec. We celebrated sixty years we have left the teacher school. Can you imagine that?? We finished school sixty years ago and we disemmenated around the whole Veracruz state. We were young, inexperienced, foolish, fatuous, unwise etc. But we had to face the situation and learning how to live in a little, little town without (sometimes) electricity, water, etc., and far away from your dad and your mom, jaja. And you WERE the teacher, you had to teach. I remember we had to walk three Km. from the bus stop to my school. The school had a well, so we got water using a small bucket tied to a rope because teachers and students had to clean the classrooms. I took my task so seriously that when we finished my hands were bleeding because of the rope. Anyway the party was really nice and it was a lot of fun to see my old friends — gordos, enfermos, canonsos, rengos, sordos pero muuuuuyyy felices.”

“My reading workshop goes beautifully, last week we read LOS SORRENTINOS by Virginia Higa, un Argentine young writer who was very successful with her provincial story. I didn’t like her book. It was well written but very forgettable. This week we have ATONEMENT by Iam McEwan and I am really enjoying the story. Okay I leave you, I hope you are ok and the Johnsons too big hugs and kisses Elvia.”

Her group was reading Katherine Ann Porter and I suggested they not neglect Porter’s best story, The Thief, or Theft, I forget the title exactly, have to look it up.

Sid is giving a concert at Lonehollow, his last one was very successful. This time Tom will be playing as well, and they are both musical geniuses and their performances are not to be missed. I’ve had the honor and pleasure of playing alongside both of them; (have to brag).

November 2nd we had six inches of rain within a few hours, so our group was rained out of playing at the fall fair and all the booths and activities were absolutely drowned. Shelly Summers and her husband Lee had their booth awning collapse on them. Shelly and Lee are singing in cantata and I heard about it at cantata practice. But the rain was miraculous — we were in the last stages of drought just before we took on the appearance of the Gobi Desert. There are so many beautiful old trees down — just dried up, gave up and fell over. Trying again for Fall Fair on the 23rd — we already had our practice for the 2nd at Diane’s house, decided on songs, we have our scores, so it’ll be easy.

Christmas and my mailbox is overflowing with Christmas catalogues. Such a waste of paper! Mostly they go in the trash.

A writer friend in Canada asked me my opinion on the lack of working/rural people in contemporary literature — storytelling — and contributed his own — so I spent some time on the internet and lots of people are asking that question. And have been for years.

So the POV is almost always from the urban observer. “They” appear as dreadfully disadvantaged, poor, ignorant, abused hungrydesperateinferiorfaultydefectivestupid. Here’s the blurb for Tillie Olson’s Yonnondio ‘ “A life devoid of joy for a young girl, father drinks, mother always pregnant, all happiness destroyed.”

I never read it; who would? Yikes. It’s like bondage porn or something. Many eons ago when I was teaching a creative writing course at Philips Andover I pinned up a picture of one of my cousins and said, “Okay write something about this person and her life.” I happened to catch Macy sitting on the long front porch of her and Bill’s trailer, in a big floppy skirt, red hair flying out like a coronal eclipse — and every one of them wrote how she was longing to get to the big city, her husband beat her, she had ten kids, their truck was repossessed, she sobbed all night, they ate grits and fried alligator, her dad was a drunk, etc., you can imagine. Every. Last. One.

A fun place to go to research the LITERARY aspect — and I emphasize LITERARY (novels, stories, films, poems… LITERATURE) is TV Tropes, and you’ll have fun fun fun until your daddy takes your T-bird away. Look up ‘working-class hero’ — and there you will find said all that needs to be said and to heck with all the knowing clever and boring Guardian etc. articles.

Moths are not just the gray things flying around your lamp; I have found many in brilliant colors, or muted, delicate shades, and in the bright sunshine flying circles around one another dressed in sunshine yellow.

When it rains it seems, no matter what time of year, things bloom. My lantana under the big Spanish oak in back burst into flower after the Noah-level rain we got and is being sweetly assaulted, kissed, blessed and extravagantly loved by butterflies. Yellow ones; very yellow with the sunlight directly on them and then oddly greenish when backlit.

And one drab unglamorous fellow ignoring the gorgeous ones, nom nom nom on the floral banquet.

And so let us quietly contemplate the arrival of Christmas without panic. Yoga kitty!

…was set upon the date of the armistice signed to end world war 1 on the 11th day of the 11th month at 11 o’clock European time. Thank you veterans.