buried mirror: latest reflections

This truetype typeface is a free download from dafont.com. It would be nice if the meaning of the glyphs was documented, but for the price who can complain?

This book, one of the classics of travel writing, is now available online via Google Book Search. It’s a funky scan, but at least it’s not an appalling abridged edition like one I saw published a few years ago. The image is the original 1842 edition, from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum in New [...]

The First Tortilla, a children’s book by Rudolfo Anaya (University of New Mexico Press, 2007) has received the New Mexico Library Association and the New Mexico International Reading Association’s Land of Enchantment Book Award. The book is the story of a Mexican girl who saves her village by making the first tortilla with the help [...]

Here’s a poem by the Guatemalan poet Luis de Lión, who was disappeared during the war. (Please tell me if I have mistranslated anything.) Inventory of a dawn rooster drunkard dog another dog another rooster dog dog dog dog drunkard many roosters many dogs all the dogs all the roosters drunkard fewer dogs no roosters [...]

Dichos are Spanish popular sayings. Unlike proverbios, which are more extended thoughts, dichos can be either brief phases or longer refranes. When I was running Mercury House I published a book by José Antonio Burciaga, called En Pocas Palabras /In Few Words: A Compendium of Latino Folk Wit and Wisdom. Sadly, Tony succumbed to cancer [...]

On the chicken bus. Bonus: another chicken bus photo

Ilan Stavans reviews Francisco Goldman’s The Art of Political Murder in the Los Angeles Times. The book is a look at the 1998 murder of bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, vicar-general of Guatemala City. Goldman’s book apparently imlpicates current presidential candidate Otto Pérez Molina in the murder. Stavans criticizes the book (which I have not yet [...]

Jorge Ubico y Castañeda ruled as dictator of Guatemala from 1931 to 1944, the year documented in this great historical footage (with “Sail to the Moon” by Radiohead as a soundtrack). Ubico was one of the models for the president in Miguel Angel Asturias’s classic novel El Señor Presidente (The President). Asturias’s book stands as [...]