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It’s the end of October, and it’s happening on a weekend: Halloween and Los Días De Los Muertos, that I modestly proposed be made into a three-day fiesta in my novel Smoking Mirror Blues.
And we see her, popping up on the interwebs, and coming to your barrio soon -- La Catrina, the skull-faced lady with the fancy hat.
She first showed up in a zinc etching by José Guadalupe Posada somewhere around 1910, 1913-ish -- ¡LA REVOLUÇIÓN! Posada intended her as a caricature of the rich, catrina, in spanish meaning well-dressed, rich, fop, dandy.
The etching, and image, without the benefit of an internet or social media, struck a cord with Mexican culture, and became a popular icon.
Diego Rivera modernized her between 1947 and 1948, providing her with dress and feathered serpent boa in his mural Sueno de un Tarde Dominical en La Alameda Central -- originally in the Hotel del Prado on Alameda Park, but moved after the building was damaged in the earthquake of 1985 and torn down. It’s now in the Museo Mural Diego Rivera, Mexico City, Tenochtitlán, La Capital Azteca. Rivera also made her an avatar of Aztec Mother Godess Coatlicue, adding another layer to her idenity.
Since then, she’s evolved. Today’s Catrina wears the sugar skull face make up, and is glamorous -- taking us back to the 18th century Scots meaning, enchantment, magic, and the fact that the word is an alteration of grammar, which in the Middle Ages refered to occult parctices associated with learning -- and sexy in ways not yet franchised by Hollywood and the fashion industry. It’s a different, subversive concept of beauty, similar to that of the Goths, whose style is being toned down and absorbed by nerd culture, that is in danger of becoming another corporate marketing strategy.
I keep hoping the nerds will see beyond the suburban bubble that they are kept in, get inspired, go wild, and scare the crap out of those who are trying to control them. Encounters with La Catrina can help with this, because no one can control La Catrina. She’s a goddess -- like her sister Santa Muerte -- the return of an ancient, elemental thing that cannot be tamed.
Have a weird and wonderful Dead Daze!
So here we are. 2012, and the Mayan Calendar -- that may actually be the Olmec Calendar -- are coming to an end. October’s coming to an end too. And you know what that means . . . Halloween . . . then los Días de los Muertos . . . put them together, and you’ve got Dead Daze!
And these are going to be extra special Dead Daze, because my novel, Smoking Mirror Blues, will be FREE from the Amazon Kindle store from October 31st to November 4th. That’s Halloween, both Days of the Dead, and an extra Saturday!
Sunday, it goes back up to $2.99. There are those who would say that continuing this to Sunday would be blasphemy. Then there are others who would relish the blasphemy of buying Smoking Mirror Blues on the Sunday after Dead Daze.
I’m also offering snippets from the novel and its reviews, as well as suggestions for music to read it by on Facebook, Twitter, and my blog. Come on down, and join the party!
Like I’ve said before, I think that Dead Daze is a good idea. Let's make it a real transborder event, taking it beyond the hipster holiday that it has become.
Can we remember our dead loved ones, celebrate our cultures, and let loose our imaginations all at the same time for three fantastic days? I think we can, and should.
Or as President Malcolm Jones says in Smoking Mirror Blues:
I think it's a very American phenomenon -- the creation of a new culture and new traditions out of those that are coming together in Southern California.
And we’re seeing interesting developments in Mexico with megaofrendas becoming larger than life walk-thru environments. What will happen when cyber and robotic technologies are plugged in? I can hardly wait!
Who knows? Maybe some recombocultural celebrating can help solve our border conflicts?
Welcome to the Global Barrio! Next stop, the Galactic Barrio!
Ernest Hogan’s novels Smoking Mirror Blues and Cortez on Jupiter are back from limbo as ebooks. His recombocultural classic High Aztech will be ebookized soon. Tezcatlipoca whispers into his ear.
Smoking Mirror Blues is back! I’m experimenting with Amazon’s Kindle Select program, which means that it will be exclusively available on Kindle for 90 days. Amazon Prime customers will be able to check it out for free through the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library (and they pay me every time it’s checked out!), and from Halloween through los Día de Los Muertos and the Saturday after the Dead Daze weekend, it will be FREE.
I do hope some of you can’t wait, and buy it ASAP -- the Ernest Hogan Defense Fund could use the money.
It’s already being hailed as “A raw, raunchy voice/A Burroughs-esque horror show . . .” and “One of the great ‘lost’ SF novels of the c.21st” which is good for the avant-garde literary and speculative fiction crowds -- but for La Bloga, I should make it clear that it is Chicano/Latino Lit, and not just because I’m a Chicano of Villaista/curandero lineage.
The whole story of Smoking Mirror Blues is kicked off by the antics of a Chicano mad scientist/hacker. Beto Orozco is based on what has become an Aztlán archetype. I have met a lot of tech-savy chamucos who are aware of their culture and their struggle, who are bringing a special kind of creativity to living and working in the Information Age. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that one or more are working on god-generating software.
It is an Aztec god that is brought to life,Tezcatlipoca, the warrior/wizard trickster. I plug Aztec mythology into a cyberpunkoid world, and the novel explodes into the readers mind and echoes across reality. Really. With Tezcatlipoca such things are possible.
The action starts on Halloween and continues through both Days of the Dead. They have been combined into the cross-border recombocultural Dead Daze. I think Dead Daze is a great idea. And I keep seeing the holidays and cultures colliding, creating a brave, new celebration.
The location is Los Angeles, El Lay, the city where I was born, the epicenter of my Eastlos roots. I rev up my imagination and bring the personality and possibilities of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Angeles del Rio de Porciúncula to dazzling life.
When writing a novel, if you’re lucky, you are like a mad scientist -- the monster comes to life, runs amok over the environment, and all you have to do is take notes on the mayhem. Smoking Mirror Blues is that kind of a monster. Now I’ve turned it loose on the world again. I wonder what kind of mayhem I’ll be taking notes on . . .
Ernest Hogan is busy promoting Smoking Mirror Blues and getting High Aztech ready for ebook release. Tezcatlipoca keeps putting diabolical ideas into his head. Meanwhile, the Sacred Calendar is coming to an end.
A critic once described my style as “shakycam” -- as in low-budget documentaries shot with hand-held cameras in close, dangerous quarters. It wasn’t intended as a compliment, but does describe what I do as well as how I write.
I know I have a writing career because, like Frankenstein’s monster, it has taken on a life of its own. I keep losing track of it. I have to check my blog to make sure. Keeping up with it gets shakycam.
Take these items from my to-do list:
I’ve been (with the help of my wife) getting my novel Smoking Mirror Blues ready to become an ebook. We finally got through the final go-over and sent it off to the formatter. Tezcatlipoca willing, it may be available around Día de los Muertos.
That done, I started the tedious task of scanning my novel High Aztech -- like Cortez on Jupiter, it was written back in the Ninteen-Hundreds on an ancient mechanism called a typewriter. Not only that, but because of the Españahuatl slang, I’m probably the only human being on the planet who can do the necessary proofreading. I’m in for some fun times in the next few months!
I’m also working on a science fiction short story and a novel about bullfighting. The short story may end up as part of the novel in the end, but it actually creates more work for me.
I’ve decided to put my fantasy novel about the preColumbian ball game aside for a while because, if you haven’t guessed, I’m kind of busy. And I can’t let that cam get too shaky.
And I finally got a chance to do a collection of my short fiction. This is going to one desmadre of a project! It will include works from the typewriter era that will have to be scanned, and will be a twisted thirty-year journey through the strange things that grew in my mind, and the strange places where they got published. Trying to read it in one sitting will probably cause hallucinations and brain damage.
Imagine what putting together that document will be like!
When going over my list of published stories, I realized that there were some that will have to go in other volumes. “The Frankenstein Penis” and its sequel have a still-growing number of true stories connected to them. Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars, and Victor Theremin, the science fiction writer who has lost track of where science fiction ends and his life begins, also demand their own books.
And after crossing a few things off my to-do list, I remembered something I had to add to it. Better get to work.
Ernest Hogan really is doing all that stuff. Being a Chicano makes it more complicated and exciting. It’s also very shakycam.
The season is upon us: Halloween/Jalogüín, and/or Días de los Muertos.
In my novel Smoking Mirror Blues I suggested combining them into a three-day celebration – Dead Daze. I still think it's a great idea, and I recommend it whenever I can. Maybe one of these daze . . .
But this was the 21st century, and recomboculture was a global phenomenon. Halloween collided with the Day of the Dead, becoming Jalogüín even here in the very heart of Mexico. Someday soon it would be a mongrelized Dead Daze, just like Beto's El Lay. (From Smoking Mirror Blues.)
There are those who think that Halloween and spookiness require a cooler climate that Aztlán. I've never seen it. Probably because I was first introduced to Carlos Fuentes via
Last week's post began the Charla-Interview with Ernest Hogan, an internationally renowned sci-fi writer practically unknown to Chicano readers. The purpose of this is not to tell Chicanos they should read his sci-fi; the purpose is to introduce this vato and explain why you might like checking out his work, because confining our literary experience to predominately "ethnic works" and avoiding vampiro detective or reincarnated Aztec god spec fiction might be the flip side of Anglos who shun Chicano novels.
But in fact, Hogan's works are "ethnic." The sociological, political, cultural backstories to his futuristic novels make them so. I'm still amazed he succeeded in getting them published, given how Chicano they are.
For instance, his third novel Smoking Mirror Blues is a blast of avalanching prose about protagonist Beto Orozco who gets caught up in his artificial-intelligence creation of the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca, set in future El Lay. It's not the Hollywood Blvd. we know; it's not the Chicano community you grew up in. But Hogan drapes his stories with elements of our world and herein lies the "ethnicity" that appeals, at least to this Chicano.
Smoking Mirror Blues has a Black President. Okay, that's not sci-fi anymore, but when it was published in 2001 it was. High Aztech features a U.S. government gone Christian-extreme, to the point of burning heretics on the White House lawn. Almost where G. Bush Jr. wanted to take us or Palin would have. With that, Hogan's taking the reader maybe more into the horror genre than sci-fi, but point is, his treatment of issues we face today proves the relevancy created in this genre.
El Texto
RG: With that intro, Ernesto, one of the common themes in all three of your novels is immigration. In Cortez, your graffiti-art hero emigrates to Jupiter for a better life; you've got the U.S. building the Tortilla Curtain on the border; and in High Aztech you give us a renamed Mexico City--Tenochtítlan--as the capital of a country U.S. gringos emigrate to because La Amerika failed as a superpower. I know you live in Arizona, but do you think you might have overdone it with the Migra issue? And why'd you think it'd make it past the slush piles?
EH: When you put it that way, I look like an obsessed, militant vato loco, but truth is, I tend to write about immigration because I can’t escape the issue. I just noticed that some the art I sent you for this interview is about the Migra, and was drawn long before the cu
What a deal! Thanks for the link. I'll put it up on my blog (10 Must Have Items for Dia De Los Muertos)and make it 11 items.
The Dead Daze freebie deal will only be from October 1st to November 3rd! I just can't get the Kindle thing to give all those a days. Mysterious forces in the net. Anyway, get yours early avoid the rush!