The Frontiers of Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy has been proclaimed as one of the greatest contemporary writers to herald from the United States and, also, as a writer that can be set historically alongside both John Williams (Butcher’s Crossing) and Oakley Hall (Warlock), in producing a pantheon of masterpieces addressing the borders, landscapes, and geographies of the American west. Such status could be conferred as much by Blood Meridian, marked by its twenty-fifth anniversary this year, as the novels that constitute The Border Trilogy including All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain.

15M and the Anarchist Roots of Lavapiés

15M Anniversary in the Puerta del Sol, Madrid. May12, 2012

For those of you interested in 15M, okupas and the like I thought I would share this short item I recently published about Madrid’s 15M movement and the neighborhood of Lavapiés in The Volunteer, the online journal of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

Lavapiés and the Anarchist Roots of 15M.

Geography and Literature: Galdós “La novela en el tranvía” [in Spanish]

So I’ve been trying to have students do more technologically advanced projects for the classes I teach in Spanish, sometimes related to urban themes… This last semester I taught 18th & 19th-century Spanish literature, and included a number of literary essays/stories relevant to urban studies and I had them use iwork [a layout/magazine program for MAC] to create their own digital magazines on topics related to the class readings. In the future I’d like to assign a project where they make videos too, so I figured I’d better learn exactly how easy that would be for undergraduates. This video [in Spanish] on a short story by Benito Pérez Galdós titled “La novela en el tranvía” is the result (just a first effort, probably not ‘A’ material just yet…).