Pete Warzel Reviews Álvaro Enrigue's "You Dreamed of Empires"

Review by Pete Warzel

Last year in August this blog published a review of a history of the conquest of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, Conquistadors and Aztecs, by Stefan Rinke. That was then, this is now. Welcome to the Electric Kool-Aid conquest of the Mexica/Nahua…an extraordinary reimagining of the machinations of colonialism. Tenochtitlan here is Tenoxtitlan and 1519 is cast in a modern literary trip, non-stop, cranked up a notch or two by the ingestion of magic mushrooms. Álvaro Enrigue manages a fantastical Cortés v. Moctezuma endgame, and it works as a novel for our times.

Mr. Enrigue is an award-winning Mexican author who has taught at Columbia and Princeton, working on his PhD in Latin American literature to while away the time. He has the literary chops for this epic story that sets in motion the history of the Western hemisphere, including the devolution to our convoluted corner of the Southwest. We all know the story of the Conquest of Mexico, but not from this angle. It is stunning.

You Dreamed of Empires

Written by Álvaro Enrigue
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
Riverhead Books
Hardcover
240 Pages
$28.00.

He begins the novel with a note, instructions to his English translator, that explains his use of Nahua words and names, with pronunciations. Then he backs off, apologizes with the truest rationalization of a writer and his work. “…But I’m a writer and words matter to me. They may signify and signal, but I believe they also invoke.” 

Enrigue’s prose hints at Garcia Marquez – fluid, poetic always, but not timid. There are echoes of Borges. Dialogue is embedded in the narrative without quotation marks, much like Cormac McCarthy’s writing, but it is not difficult to follow. All flows smoothly in the story. He takes on the gore of Aztec social justice and the bone-crunching violence of battle with a wicked sense of humor. It is a chilling scene when we encounter Moctezuma with his sister/wife Atoxtli that runs counter to our historical conception of his indecisiveness regarding the Spanish invaders. “There’ll be no scandal in this house, and if I have to erase you, I will.” That is the cold voice of an emperor and a very icy brother. “These are days of blood and shit.” That is the voice of a pragmatic leader. 

All of the characters are historical, save one fictional invention. Enrigue himself appears in real time in a scene where the tripping Moctezuma sees him and certainly does not understand. The story proper is divided into four sections, and all action takes place in the course of one day – when the Spaniards enter Tenoxtitlan for the first time. It begins with “Before the Nap,” in the heart of the city at Moctezuma’s invitation. Most of the action is internal to the characters as they feast with the emperor’s sister/wife in the old palace. There is a wonderful episode where the captains of the Spanish search for their stable boy and the 27 horses in his charge. They begin to walk the palace rooms and hallways, lost in a maze, a labyrinth, and the narration is the stuff of nightmares. “Also, they had the sense that the corridors and cells they’d been wandering through were getting narrower and narrower.” They call and hear response from the rest of the Spanish soldiers in the palace. “They were on the other side of the long wall, but Caldera and his men couldn’t figure out how to get to them despite walking the length of it several times.” I have had a variation of that dream many times.

Section two is “Moctezuma’s Nap” – the center of the book. “The silence his nap demanded was imperial.” The story’s motion is on hiatus. Section three, “After the Nap” starts the forward march of history with long narration and quick cut scenes of the stress-induced palace intrigue within Moctezuma’s court. Parallel action by Cortés, Moctezuma, his sister, and the fictional character, Jazmín Caldera, moves rapidly, all leading to the same place at the same time – the end of the day for the temple sacrifices. The emperor is tripping on more and more mushrooms and Enrigue inserts modern drug slang into the story. “…Give me a slide, a whole one.” Time becomes surreal as Moctezuma and his high priest at the temple of  Huitzilopochtli hear music, and begin to dance to the music of Marc Bolan’s 1970’s rock band, T. Rex. The song is “Monolith” and you really must give it a listen to put the whole novel in context. Linked here.

Section Four, “Cortés’s Dream,” is a powerhouse of imagery at the meeting of Cortés and Moctezuma, with all the novel’s players present. Cortés delivers a history of Christianity and the emperor bids the conquistador to “dream now.” The day ends, the action of the novel is over. But the dream…it is the dream of the entire history of Mexico from that day forward, condensed elegantly into three pages. “…But the new kingdom that he had called  New Spain grew so much that it stretched all the way to another enormous kingdom to the north, to be called New Mexico.” Magnificent.

With all the press on this novel, I expected a doorstop of a book. It is about the size of a paperback physically and runs to just 227 written pages. A surprisingly modest package, but also an epic undertaking. To put it all succinctly, “No one had any idea what was going on.” We can recount history, but most assuredly we still do not know what is really going on in our world.

Álvaro Enrigue’s novel is a marvel.

Book Review of Stefan Rinke's "Conquistadors and Aztecs: A History of the Fall of Tenochtitlan"

Conquistadors and Aztecs: A History of the Fall of Tenochtitlan
By Stefan Rinke
Translated by Christopher Reid
Oxford University Press
Hardcover, 328 pages
$34.95

Book Review by Pete Warzel

The fall of the Mexica (Aztec) capital city, Tenochtitlan, and subsequent colonization of what we now call Mexico, is rife with misconceptions, and holds our interest as the start of the movement north into our New Mexico. There are many parallels of struggle, colonization, and after-effects for indigenous populations between the Valley of Mexico invasion and the entrada into the kingdom of New Mexico. Dr. Rinke, professor of the Department of History at the Institute of Latin American Studies at Freie University, Berlin, has written a detailed but engaging history that clarifies Spanish disruption and settlement of the Americas. The book has been translated from the German original.

“By the time Christopher Columbus dies in Valladolid, Spain, on May 20, 1506, the euphoria about his westward voyage and the newly discovered territories in the Indies had turned to disillusionment.” That fitting start to this book encapsulates succinctly the discovery and fitful exploration from 1492. Enter Cortes: Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano.

Dr. Rinke gives a good history of the Spanish Caribbean and existing colonial cities before the further exploration of the Mexican mainland, as well as a brief history of Cortés’ familial background and first successes in the region.  The Mainland action begins in November 1518, when an expedition was put together in Santiago, Cuba where Cortés was the mayor for the Yucatan and then further inland. What is clear in the preparations for conquest is the politics of the Spanish court, colonies, and expansion in the new world. Everything is political intrigue. It is a distant echo of our own times of incivility and urge to political/economic gain, but perhaps on a grander scale. This is an international stage; Europe and the new unknown. Cortés has enemies in the new world, specifically in the Governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, and his minions. Money, position, and pay-off are the keys to the kingdom, and all the players are adept at working the system to their advantage. The Velázquez/Cortés rivalry goes on for years.

The expedition is a “hueste” defined by the Crown taking a share of the profits, and there is no doubt that the army that accompanied Cortés as he set sail, was a corps of three hundred soldiers of fortune. Rinke iterates that gold is the mantra here. The irony is that they, the mercenaries, certainly including Cortés, are deeply religious and baptism competes as the driving force for conquest with greed. This will remain the pattern throughout the conquest of Mexico and New Mexico – economic gain for the Crown and self, and “…the use of the cross as a war symbol…was very important.” “…They were able to cultivate an image of themselves as missionaries of the sword, even though, in reality, this was only a cover for their true motivation.”

The outline of the conquest is known to us all. The detail of how it worked is the core of this book. Rinke’s research is rigorous. We think of the original three hundred Spaniards and the impossibility of conquering the great Mexica city-state and alliances with such a small army, grown to six hundred fifty soldiers at the final fall of Tenochtitlan. But the scale of the indigenous allies is staggering: twenty thousand at the final push for conquest. These allies were as politically adept as the Spanish, with ongoing maneuvering between the Aztec overlords and the Spanish, waiting, in effect, to see where the cards would fall, on an ongoing basis. The Tlaxcalans, who we know as a part of the history of Santa Fe, were the mainstay of the Spanish ancillary forces, fierce and with a literal axe to grind against the Mexicas.

The conflict and conquest took four battles after the Spanish fled their initial peaceful entry into the city. This war was a constant cycle of defeat, retreat, regrouping, defeat and retreat, all bloody and brutal. The Tlaxcalans were intent on genocide of the Mexica in their capital city. The Spanish army grew with reinforcements and soldiers changing sides when Cortés defeated an opposing expedition sent by Velázquez to remove Cortés from his potentially lucrative position in Mexico.

The key underlying elements of Aztec defeat included a real hesitancy by Moctezuma to forcefully engage the invaders. Negotiations and gifts were the initial defense, perhaps partly due to Mexica myths of the return of their own god, Quetzalcoatl in the guise of the Spanish invaders. Further, the tenuous political alliances and tribute power held by Tenochtitlan fueled these rival states for revenge and alliance with the Spanish in numbers that strengthened the invading force to one of sufficient size to lay siege to the city and prevail. The tradition of “flower wars,” where rival city-states engaged in battle to take prisoners for ritual sacrifice and not specifically to kill the enemy on the battlefield, was a cultural handicap in a position of all-out war by the Spanish, and the violent revenge motivation of the Tlazcalans. Finally, the Mexica did fight to win, but the siege, including a ring of ships built by the Spanish specifically to blockade the city on Lake Texcoco, was the key to victory, as related by one Spanish chronicle of the invasions: “More people die of hunger than from the iron.”

The result of the conquest from 1518 to 1521 was an established Spanish capital city on mainland Mexico, a base for further exploration of what we know as New Mexico beginning in 1540, and first colonization in 1598. “The conquest of Tenochtitlan was thus the culmination of a Mesoamerican war, which must be understood as part of the long history of military conflicts between the Mexica and their countless enemies.” Cortés did not conquer the Aztecs with a handful of Spanish mercenaries but with superior weapons and the allied city-states that knew how to play Cortés and Moctezuma against each other for their own political and economic gain. Mesoamerica and the Valley of Mexico were structurally unstable to begin with. The Spanish invaders provided a hesitancy in proactive defense by the Aztecs through their myths of gods returning, as well as the opportunity for Tlaxcalans, and Totanocs to ally with the superior and maybe mystical firepower, to affect revenge, brutal revenge, on their Mexica overlords. But it was the sheer number of allies that was the key. Three hundred Spanish conquistadors, even with magical guns and horses, could not have accomplished the conquest.

Dr. Rinke creates a well-defined history of the seemingly “miraculous” victory of the Spaniards against the powerful Mexica city-state. It is a history we know but know much better now due to this fine work of historical research and writing.

Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America: A Book Review by Pete Warzel

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
By Ned Blackhawk
Yale University Press
Hardcover
616 pages
$35.00

Review by Pete Warzel

Ned Blackhawk, School for Advanced Research board director, Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, and the recipient of many professional awards for his research and writing, has given us a major work that explores the influence of Indigenous nations in and on the making of the United States. The research is extensive, the book eye-opening. The layers of influence and interaction are not what we learned in school, and fill in the blanks that make a more coherent whole of this nation’s history. Our pristine creation myth is perhaps not the real story.

Professor Blackhawk places a map on the inside cover and frontispiece for your first encounter with the extent of what he is about to present. It is a map of the present day United States, with the names of Native Nations located geographically, designating their pre-removal locations. The map is crowded, covered in Indigenous designations that succinctly makes the point of how extensive the original habitation of our country covered the entire landscape– and these are “select” Native Nations, not the entirety. The back inside cover and end page are a mirror image of this map, but detail the contemporary locations of state and federally recognized Native Nations. I am astounded at how many of the names are unfamiliar to me. That hole in our history is eloquently filled by Blackhawk in this serious work.

The two geographic areas where I have spent most of my life begin this history chronologically– New Mexico and the Southwest, and the northeast of Colonial France and England. I grew up in upstate New York, where the Iroquois Confederacy was familiar, the tribes legendary – Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, Oneida, and Seneca. Their names mark the geography of the Finger Lakes, New York State counties, and towns – West Seneca. NY, was a hang-out for me, Cayuga Lake a destination. New Mexico and its nineteen pueblos are home to me now, their designation on the map warranting an expanded window to show the geographic locations spilling into Arizona.

Blackhawk’s work is so extensive it is difficult to compress in this short space. Again, reflecting the crowded visual of the map, we learn that in 1492 the Americas were home to 75 million native peoples. The history lost or overlooked is immense.

You will know the Spanish history that begins the book proper. The enslavement of indigenous people by Europeans as well as by other indigenous tribes is becoming more known in our exploration of the past in New Mexico. The same is true in the traditional narrative of the founding of our country, the colonial Northeast. Details that we might be unaware of are brought to light by Blackhawk’s research, such as the very poor military performance by George Washington, as a British commander during the French and Indian War (Seven Years War), pre-American revolution. There is the symbiotic relationship of the native nations with the French in Canada and into the northern Midwest that was built on trade and protection, throwing balance into chaos when the British defeated the French in the French and Indian War. The French left their names behind in the geography and cities (Detroit, Belle Fourche, Des Moines, LaCrosse, etc.), but also left, upon their withdrawal, a new power structure that Blackhawk argues was the spark of the revolution that created the United States.

It is just that notion of creation that is the heart of the argument of this book. Colonial expansion from the original British colonies, and the power displacements leading to Indigenous migrations, followed by colonist land expansion into the Ohio River Basin and further west, created a vacuum that the British government could not fill. Militias formed by the colonists took land from the displaced tribes and nations, and sparked a trend of intentional violence against native people, but also against British troops. The first shots of what would be the American revolution may have been fired in March, 1765, in Pennsylvania. The frontier settlers began raids on British supply trains that carried trade goods to the tribes, and “…laid siege to English forts in the region.” Blackhawk terms this rebellious, political movement “settler sovereignty”, that later in the year embraced urban protests against taxes and our school-taught history of the Boston Tea Party.

There are parallels to our troubled times today. Following the French and Indian War, really a global colonial power struggle, British colonists expanded west, and Pontiac’s War (an Odawa leader) began almost immediately. A vigilante group was formed in 1763, self-titled the Paxton Boys, renamed later the Black Boys. “An interior political culture was forming that disdained Indians and the eastern officials who supported them.” This sounds all too familiar, and although the name may be coincidence, it is eerily parallel to the contemporary neo-fascist group the Proud Boys, and the rise of fringe militias in our country. The mid-eighteenth century version was also racially biased. Benjamin Franklin, then a loyal British subject and member of the Pennsylvania colonial legislature, wrote a treatise in 1764, “ A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County of a Number of Indians, FRIENDS of this Province” that declaimed “the only Crime seems to have been, that they had a reddish brown Skin, and Black hair.” He goes on to state that this kind of racial, violent behavior, “…is done by no civilized Nation.” Franklin was not re-elected to the legislature for his outspokenness, as the “interior” of the colonies became a new political force, and that too sounds distinctly familiar in our current politics.

The distrust of the settlers in the interior of Indigenous people now carried over to the British government, which supposedly protected westward expansion. Blackhawk cites a stunning paragraph in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, the founding document of the American Revolution that certainly has linguistic ties to our contentious monument that sits, or does not, at the center of the Santa Fe Plaza. The third to last grievance in the declaration against George III, King of England, states “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

It surprises me that a discussion about this founding rhetoric never surfaced during the “battle” over the soldiers monument in Santa Fe, given the original “Savage Indians” statement carved in the monument, and then chiseled out in the night. We are indeed ignorant of our own history, or perhaps, selectively so, and begs the question what do we do with our memorialized founding document – change it, chisel the words from the paper? Ignore it?

Professor Blackhawk’s impeccable history urges us to ask these hard questions.

Governing by the initial Articles of Confederation, the new U.S structure and infrastructure was lacking, and became a driving force of the creation of the United States Constitution in 1787, more specifically addressing the relationship with, and management of, Native Nations. But the young, independent U.S. still faced uncertainties in its administration and application of its new laws. Looking to acquiring territory from foreign holdings in North America, the new U.S. administration needed to find a legal way to do so. “Could the federal government ‘purchase’ lands, and if so, how were these lands to be added to the Union? And what was to be done with the Native and non-U.S. peoples upon them?” Acquisition by war and conquest were recognized by the Constitution. But how was the new country to govern other circumstances? Treaties with the Native Nations became the country’s internal growth mechanism, accompanied certainly by the now repeated violence of settlers against Indians. Blackhawk argues that the treaty process in place set the path for relations with other countries and empires, and the further acquisition of territories to add to the growing boundaries of the new country. The U.S cut its diplomacy teeth on Indigenous Nations.

In 1860 the pattern of expansion and violence repeats as the nation drives towards Civil War. Union soldiers stationed in the west for Indian matters are recalled for the war, and volunteer militias take on the process, again, of “settler colonialism.” As Professor Blackhawk points out, through the words of General John Pope in orders to Colonel Henry Sibley, ‘it is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so….” We cannot hide that direct statement behind the blur of time and history. This federal position is a stark, reprehensible admission. It is our country’s history, plain and chilling.

In a recoil from federal mismanagement of relationships, many tribes also seceded from the Union, forming treaties with the Confederate States. In 1864 a Cherokee secessionist, Stand Watie, became a brigadier general, and “…was the last Confederate general to surrender.” Other tribes and leaders sought to maintain the treaties made with the United States–the Union –abiding by a commitment to the law. As Blackhawk relates about Indian Territory, “…the war was becoming a civil war within the civil war.”

The period following the Civil War, into the twentieth century, and now into the twenty-first, is an alternative repeat of policies and friction. “Termination” in the 1950s and 60s was an attempt by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to terminate treaties, and so tribal lands, hinting at or promising individual compensation, and more direct control by the nations. Given the murky status of sovereignty and U.S. citizen status of tribal members, termination promised it all, including relocation programs for Indian families to urban areas This effort resulted in a significant protest movement, awareness by the general public, and a true step forward in self-management, and economic development through reversal of termination, and re-establishment of sovereign autonomy on the reservations. Professor Blackhawk cites the establishment of IAIA in Santa Fe, as a transformative experience in empowering this trend.

Ned Blackhawk has given us a major work of American history. It is straightforward, rigorous, non-apologetic, and non-accusative. (The facts and citations are damning on their own). The book is simply a presentation of a documented history that we have never entertained previously, one that fills in the blanks of time to give us a more complete story of our nation’s founding and evolution. Writing of the Cold War era, Professor Blackhawk states “For most Americans, Indian affairs seemed inconsequential.” Hopefully, that is no longer the case, but if so, perhaps this book, and its wide reach into our collective history, can help to change that.

If you can grapple with the early 18th century, and the mid-19th century quotations cited above, and believe that violent rhetoric is outdated in our country and world view, let us end with a quote by Mayor Herschel Melcher, Chamberlain, South Dakota, speaking about the urban migration of Native Americans as the treaties were offered “termination” in exchange for citizen rights and self-management: “We do not intend to let an Indian light around here at all. If they come in here it will be necessary to declare an open season on Indians….We do not want them and we see no reason why we should, and don’t want them in our schools.” This from the 1960s, not so long ago in our self-enlightened times. In other words, as Blackhawk points out. Indians threaten “the American way of life.” That is the very convoluted logic that we see today in the politicization of everything American.

Take the time to read and think through the work presented in this powerful history. It is well-worth your understanding of who and how we really are as a nation.

Far From Respectable: The Art of David Hickey - A Book Review by Pete Warzel

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Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art

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Review by Pete Warzel 

Somewhere near Santa Fe lives a man who in the 1990s set the art world spinning, with joy or disdain, depending upon which side of the working divide you were on.

The divide was in makers and doers in the democracy of art and beauty v. the arbiters of art, the tastemakers, the “therapeutic institution” that told you what was worth looking at or listening to or reading at night. Dave Hickey should have been on the institutional side of the division having entered the world of art criticism and academia. He was not. He had arrived via start-up art galleries and managing an established one in NYC (from which he resigned when asked to present an exhibition of Yoko Ono’s artwork), writing songs in Nashville, drugs, sex, rock and roll, and doing a stint as executive editor of Art in America magazine. Then Dave Hickey wrote The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty (1993), and his world and that of art criticism and the official determination of worthiness changed. For the better, I would think.

The dialogue had begun and Hickey was either a genius (he did receive a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2001) or the really bad boy in a room full of tweeds. He said in an interview in BOMB Magazine, April 1995, “…I am an art critic, which is the single unfundable, ungrantable, unendowable endeavor that is even vaguely connected with the arts. And justifiably so, in my case, since I am not with the program.”

You get the picture.

Enter Daniel Oppenheimer an excellent writer and admitted Hickey fanboy. He presents Hickey’s critical work as born in fear “… that legitimacy and legibility are the enemies  of freedom and forgiveness. So he writes to protect the places where he found refuge from the people from and in whom he perceives judgment.” Maybe. But there is no argument that Hickey’s take no prisoners’ criticism changed the conversation, perhaps the status quo.

Dave Hickey was born in Fort Worth, Texas, 1940. His father was a dedicated, amateur jazz musician, taking Dave to impromptu gigs that opened up musical and artistic worlds for the boy. The family was mobile and Dave became a surfer, a writer, eventually a gallery owner in Austin before moving to NYC and entering an entirely different realm of art, exposure to the rock stars of painting, music and literature, and a life that was not afraid to take risks or fail. He had received a BA from Texas Christian University and an MA from the University of Texas and gave up on his doctoral dissertation before opening the Austin gallery named “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”, which is typical Dickey humor since his abandoned dissertation was about “the hidden syntactic patterns in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction.”

He was writing art and music criticism for the national magazines and during a panel discussion in the late 1980s launched the idea that he would explore in depth in The Invisible Dragon, and later in Air Guitar. The theme was a democratization of art and a return to “beauty”, not precisely defined, but “the beautiful…is a form of rhetoric….The more mastery an artist has of the rhetoric of the beautiful, the more effectively he can rewire how our brains process and perceive visual sense data. It is an awesome power.” The beauty in art – painting, music, writing, can bring people together over the object or art that they love. The institutions only propound virtue, making learned judgments in doing so, and are oblivious to the individualized, multi-faceted nature of the beautiful.

“Beauty” as democratized in The Invisible Dragon would secure him a tenured position in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where the city and its cultural nuances informed his written work going forward. Writing about his associates at UNLV he observed, “I suspect that my unhappy colleagues are appalled by the fact that Vegas presents them with a flat-line social hierarchy – that having ascended from ‘food” to ‘cocktail’ in Las Vegas, there is hardly anywhere else to go (except perhaps, up to ‘magician’)…because the rich are not special in Las Vegas, because money here is just money…. Membership at the University Club will not get you comped at Caesars, unless you play baccarat.” (from Air Guitar)

In 2010 he and his wife, Libby Lumpkin, curator, art historian, and newly appointed professor of art history at UNM, moved to Albuquerque and then Santa Fe. Hickey is now in poor health, eighty years old, mostly unable to travel. However, he did return to Las Vegas in 2017 to give several lectures at UNLV, and witnessed the massacre at the Mandalay Bay Hotel. 

Although Oppenheimer does not quote Hickey about life in Santa Fe, he certainly gives hints, if we accept he has “learned” the critic well enough to speak for him, in a very Hickey-like tone – Santa Fe is “…a brief squiggle of kitsch along his Silk Road…. “ In an article written for Harvard Design Magazine in 2001 that I found, Hickey addresses his then adopted hometown, Las Vegas, Nevada, and his future place of exile, Santa Fe, New Mexico, as “dialectical utopias” because “…the cities do speak to one another – although neither one of them listens.” Hickey knows what we all know, but makes no qualms about airing his opinions, perhaps not knowing then, or more likely, not caring, that he would come to live here one day. But perhaps he had an inkling, as he also curated the acclaimed SITE Santa Fe biennial in 2001. In his curatorial statement for that exhibition, now twenty years ago, Hickey stated “I know how to look and I remember what I see.” What he saw in Santa Fe at the time (in the Harvard Design Magazine piece) was an “invented” community, a “choice”, a “dream within the dream.”  That “…attempts to embody and evoke the eternal West.”

I think that kind of observation makes the dialogue, for us, interesting, even if we are not quite listening. The parallel universes of Las Vegas and Santa Fe could only be a Hickey construct. They are each visions of the American West, two very different embodiments of the “beautiful”, and so, individual statements about the country itself. I wonder what he thinks now, after living here for a good spell.

Daniel Oppenheimer has written a succinct gem of critical biography about a writer/critic who had the insight to take on the defects of his own chosen profession, empower artists, and speak truth when the world was seemingly ready to listen. Bravo to them both. Dave Hickey might be “far from respectable” as the title implies, but a brilliant voice to listen to, and take heed. This biography just might lead you back to read Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon, or Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, to learn what the intellectual commotion was really all about.

Far From Respectable: The Art of David Hickey
University of Texas Press
Hardcover, 141pages
$24.95 (Order the book at top of this page page) 

A Book Review -- John P. Slough: The Forgotten Civil War General

John P. Slough The Forgotten Civil War General - Richard Miller

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Reviewed by Pete Warzel

On April 29, 2021 Richard Miller presented a Zoom Salon El Zaguán talk to the members and general participants of the Historic Santa Fe Foundation. The subject was John P. Slough and his unlikely victory at the battle of Glorieta Pass, New Mexico, during the early days of the American Civil War. The presentation was narrowly focused on his role as commander of the First Colorado Volunteers, marched south from Denver to defend New Mexico against the insurgent Confederate troops from Texas. Miller’s lecture was excellent, and intriguing.

The basis of the talk was Mr. Miller’s new book. John P. Slough: The Forgotten Civil War General is recently published (available in the HSFF gift shop), and although the hook here is the Civil War and perhaps for us, Glorieta, the research and writing is so much more. This is a fascinating look at regional economic and social history of the mid-west during the early 19th century. It truly is history writing at its best – an individual biography placed within the greater cultural context of geography and time, and significant social disorder. The societal turmoil and accompanying political interaction is eerily familiar to us today.

Slough began his business and political career in Cincinnati, Ohio, a booming city on the edge of the fault line where pro and anti-slavery factions, as well as the political parties, became violent. Remember, at this time the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln, and so Free-Staters. The Democrats then, leaned to slavery and the new Kansas Territory became the battleground for not simple political warfare, but vicious physical clashes on the ground and in the statehouse. Slough was expelled from his seat in the Ohio legislature for striking a fellow representative over a personal (read political) slight. He moved to Kansas Territory in an opportunistic act to create an expansive legal business in land speculation created with the expansion west. This was the America of unlimited opportunity for aggressive individuals. It also was the America of social and political division. John Brown and his men murdered pro-slavery sympathizers in Kansas.

Kansas business leaders went to Denver in 1858 to ride the gold boom and the growth of the city named after James W. Denver, then current Kansas territorial governor. Slough followed in 1861 having previously invested in Denver real estate from afar. It was a tough frontier town, not the sophisticated home he left in Leavenworth, Kansas. “Outside the hastily built homes and shops, mules, hogs, and dogs wandered Denver’s streets in great numbers and provided sport for drunken sharpshooters.” (I am tempted here to say not much has changed in 160 years but it has). With Kansas achieving statehood, the Colorado Territory was created and government administration became imperative upon Lincoln’s election and the threat of war, to keep the territory within the Union. Colorado Territory was akin to Kansas – a hotbed of emigrants from neighboring states, south and nouth, pro and anti-slavery. William Gilpin, the territory’s first governor feared insurrection and Slough stepped in as Colonel of the 1st Colorado Volunteer Infantry, having no military background in his resumé. The volunteers were miners from the Rocky Mountains and his third in command was John Chivington, to become infamous as the commander at the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864.

I recommend viewing the recorded Salon presentation by Richard Miller on the HSFF website, regarding the Battle of Glorieta Pass, and the mis-steps of its inexperienced commander. https://www.historicsantafe.org/545-hsff-blog/2021/4/30/richard-miller-on-col-john-slough

He resigned his post and headed east to join the war proper in Virginia, to Harper’s Ferry, now as a brigadier general, and then as military Governor of Alexandria, Virginia, a major location for defeated Union forces as well as Black refugees fleeing enslavement in northern Virginia. His position afforded him access to the major players of Lincoln’s administration and the war effort.

When the war ended Slough was to make a new decision on where to start on another career to add to lawyer, politician, military commander and governor. In 1866 he became the chief justice of the New Mexico Territorial Supreme Court.

Upon visiting his former battlefield at Glorieta he was appalled at the cemetery for his fallen soldiers, and urged the Legislature to fund improvements and add “plainly inscribed monuments”. What he got was a $1500 appropriation for a monument in the city – the Soldier’s Monument. Erected in the center of Santa Fe Plaza in 1868 Slough never got to see it, as he was shot and killed in the Exchange Hotel, Santa Fe, in December 1867. As we all know, he could not see the monument today were he able.

Miller writes of the “American narrative” that “those willing to move across the continent…had a greater opportunity to gain economic and social status than the less venturesome stuck in their settled lives back east.” This was the “American land of opportunity” that John P. Slough sought, succeeded and failed, succeeded again. Yet in the end, Miller states, Slough’s life is a “story of great opportunity and failed ambition.” Richard Miller tells that story extremely well.

John P. Slough: The Forgotten Civil War General by Richard L. Miller, University of New Mexico Press, Hardcover, 304 pages.

Book Review: Fortunate Son: Selected Essays From the Lone Star State

REVIEWED BY PETE WARZEL

I have been working on a second book of essays, having abandoned the first to publishing individual pieces in magazines and literary journals, the concept of “book” depreciated.

And in this second book I feel that the voice, tone, rhythm of detail is right. The book is sound. Then I pick up Rick Bass, any Rick Bass writing, and realize how much work I have yet to do.

Bass is a widely published, numerous awards-winning writer, naturalist, environmental activist, writing mostly essay and short fiction. The Lives of Rocks: Stories (2006) is stunning short fiction. Fortunate Son, here, is a collection of essays that in his own words is a “…journalist’s Texas scrapbook”, the premise being Bass exploring the roots, memories, and the connections, now an exile in Montana, to his birth and youth and family history in Texas. The setting maybe Texas, the writing is universal.

His former profession was petroleum geologist, and that, along with his upbringing by a family invigorated by the outdoors, generates the awe he has for nature, as well as the detail of process that fills his work with wonder. He is akin to John McPhee, the great creative non-fiction writer who lived at The New Yorker and taught, still, I believe, at Princeton. They both take on eclectic subjects in search for understanding a bit of the world around them. McPhee is eastern and has, at least, roots in academia. Bass is nothing but west. 

The first piece of the collection, Into the Fire is a tour de force, a night out in Houston with the author’s childhood friend as Fire Chief, learning about the emotions and mind set, the intricacies of those who put their life on the line to stop property from turning to ash, lives from being incinerated. Bass’s nature writing is at the core of this work as he interprets the fire as “…that seemingly rarest of things, the real thing – and you can see what a living thing, what an awful animal, the fire is.” The animal imagery is a theme of this piece, even to the people who fight it. As Bass notes the anomaly of the deviant firefighter who starts fires he describes how the rest of the tribe senses the sin. “It is elemental, the way they find out. It is the way animals communicate – the way animals, who have been here in the world so much longer than we, communicate. They are never wrong.” It becomes mystical in the detail as fire is everywhere, waiting to burst through. This is nature writing in an urban landscape, wild and beautiful in its destructive energy. This is fierce writing.

Moon Story is a non-linear reflection on his youth in Texas, the lure of NASA in Houston and its moon shots, and the primal experience of watching the great solar eclipse of 2018 at his home in the Yaak Valley, Montana. It is an abstraction that fascinates. Tying the universality of the pull of the moon regardless of place, Bass taps nature once again for the proof. “On full moons, zooplankton rise to the surface as if in the Rapture; oysters spread wider their limestone lips; deer, bedded down, rise as if in a trance no matter what the hour of day is when the moon (which is always full, we must remember) is either directly overhead or, curiously, on the other side of the earth, directly underfoot.” Those details place his narrative in a much bigger world.

The Farm is idyllic. A visit to his father’s farm with his two young girls, his mother off stage having passed away. It is a wonderful recollection, but also a brilliant reproduction of a natural setting on the page. Bass has a proclivity to translate the west succinctly. “Finally it was true dark.” We all know that timing of light here, as light hangs in the sky, lingering, and then extinguished.

And so go the fourteen essays collected in this book. Captivating, well-wrought, universal. The University of New Mexico Press has done well in bringing Rick Bass to their pages.

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Fortunate Son: Selected Essays From the Lone Star State

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Fortunate Son: Selected Essays From the Lone Star State
By Rick Bass
University of New Mexico Press
216 pages
Paperback

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