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Sincerely

Francis McGovern
Literary Traveler

It’s been a brutal winter for many of us.  Cold and snowy, icy and slippery.  As I write this post, heavy wet snowflakes, though delightful and beautiful, descend upon my area of the world.  Forecasters predict it will snow until tomorrow with accumulations of up to one foot of the hard-to-shovel white stuff.

I’m not a hot weather person, as many people are.  I tend to stay out of the sun, a fear of wrinkles since I’m now over 30.  However, it’s been such a harsh winter, I’ve been dreaming of sunny days, vivid colors, the salty ocean.  A margarita or a tortilla on the beach.  It doesn’t matter because I am finding myself, like many other of our literary travelers, craving for that golden ball in the sky.

Maybe that’s why I chose our latest series of Mexico articles?  Or perhaps it was the fact I had such a good time in Mexico when I visited there – the warm people who suffered through my terrible Spanish, the delicious street food that I never got sick from once, the colorful festiveness on every street corner.

Whatever the motivation, I’m happy to introduce our Mexican series, complete with three inspiring articles about Mexican literary travels and an interview with Peggy Stevens Falkenstein, Mexican travel writer.

Frances Calderon de la Barca: Life in Mexico

Chasing a Phantom in San Miguel de Allende: Beat Inspiration Neal Cassady

Edward Abbey Desert Solitaire in the Pinacate Biosphere Reserve

Peggy Stevens Falkenstein: Tying Loose Ends in Mexico

Stay warm and explore your literary imagination in sunny Mexico!

Jennifer, Network Editorial Director

Friday, March 5 marks the release of Tim Burton’s “Alice In Wonderland.” After checking out the Tim Burton exhibit at MoMA in New York at the end of January, I predict a scrawling, blubbering, rubberized, colorized interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s hallucinatory Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Burton’s muse Johnny Depp plays a rouge-enhanced The Mad Hatter, Burton’s partner-and-muse Helena Bonham Carter bursts as The Red Queen, and Alan Rickman rolls languish as The Caterpillar.

It was easy to imagine how Charles Dodgson, who wrote “literary nonsense” under the Carroll pseudonym, influenced Burton’s work as we walked down museum-white hallways of edible stripes, chomping hoses, and sordid baby dolls. But Burton doesn’t liposuction the books he makes into films, he builds a lard house out of them and then lights it on fire to fuel his own eager, weird intellect.

I wonder how Carroll, back in the 1860s fueled his stories; when I was in school, a math teacher told my class he wrote in opium dens. His diaries, however, indicate he was simply liked children. He concocted labyrinths of hazy yet distinct and heightened rhetoric—the kind of sophisticated, wacked-out language kids get, because their impulses detect non-sense and their minds read pleasure.

It’s with that feeling Carroll and Burton capture the sensory part of our collective brain, the pleasure center—stories that blow open the prolific, complex chapters of our childhoods tend to not forget the simple joys in life.

I can’t wait to see what Burton has done on film with the story of Alice In Wonderland. It’s a place we can fall into and feel like kids.  

Moviegoers anxiously await the February 19, 2010 release of Shutter Island.  Adapted from the novel written by award-winning author Dennis Lehane, the film is sure to do well in the box office with swoon-worthy leading man Leonardo DiCaprio.

Lehane is also the crime novel mastermind behind Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, both adapted into powerhouse films.

Lehane first became popular when President Bill Clinton was in office.  Clinton asked his personal aide to find him some leisure reading.  The aide gave him Lehane’s Prayers for Rain, which Clinton was photographed holding as he emerged from Air Force One.

In the summer of 2003, I took a graduate fiction class at Harvard.  My professor recommended a talk by Dennis Lehane.  The conference  room was packed, standing room only, because Mystic River was about to come out in movie form, with Clint Eastwood directing.

Sitting there in a wooden a chair, I saw Lehane speaking in front of me, cracking up the entire audience.  With the flair of a Boston accent, Lehane told hilarious anecdotes of how his father visited the Mystic River set, met Clint Eastwood and then informed his son he could still get him a job at the local plant.  Lehane said that  Eastwood got a little “Dirty Harry on him” when persuading him to direct Mystic River.  Lehane said a limo driver was the best job for writers because you can write for hours at a time while waiting for the customer at any given event.

Basically, he was a man of the people.  Like Springsteen in Jersey, the working man’s hero.

Shutter Island opens this week and I will be sure to be there.  Though not the most literary film, it certainly will be a lot of scary fun.

Remember to explore your literary imagination with Dennis Lehane and Shutter Island . . .

Jennifer, Network Editorial Director

“Neal is, of course, the very soul of the voyage into pure, abstract meaningless motion. He is The Mover, compulsive, dedicated, ready to sacrifice family, friends, even his very car itself to the necessity of moving from one place to another.” –William Burroughs, on Neal Cassady

Neal Cassady–legendary figure of inspiration for the Beat generation–embodied freedom, passion, and sheer vitality. Neal contained the darker aspects of that freedom as well: the inability (and lack of desire) to create permanent connections, an almost selfish quest for new experiences.

In the newest article on Literary Traveler, “Chasing a Phantom in San Miguel de Allende: Beat Inspiration Neal Cassady,” author Anthony Maulucci reflects on the complicated allure of Neal Cassady, and larger-than-life personalities in general.

Maulucci travels in Mexico to visit the site of Neal Cassady’s death. Many brilliant pieces from the Beat generation were penned in Mexico–Kerouac’s Tristessa and Mexico City Blues, William Burrough’s Junky, Gregory Corso’s masterpiece Gasoline. What is the ultimate cost of complete freedom? Follow Maulucci’s visit, and explore some of the same questions that inspired Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the other Beat generation writers.