The Day of the Dead in Mexico

Cultural festivities for  the Day of the Dead (Dia de Los Muertos) in Mexico should emphasize the spiritual over the commercial. Much of the activity I’m seeing around San Miguel de Allende is much more commercial than it should be, and this seems to be the result of too much media attention in the US. Caterinas, painted skulls, and skeletons abound. Is this respectful to the sacred tradition of the holiday? Families get together to make flowers and use them to adorn altars, they gather at home or at el cementerio to remember their departed loved ones, they DO NOT dance around with someone dressed up as a Catrina, and to multiply these Catrina figures (a skeleton dolled up as a tawdry female, for those who don’t know) does a terrible disservice to the spiritual beliefs of the occasion. You might even go as far as to call it sacrilegious. As a cultural festival in honor of the day, it is all rather tasteless. This is just another example of how the US mass media have commercialized and corrupted the traditions and cultures of North America.

The Nobel Prize Has Lost Its Prestige

I’ve always liked Bob Dylan’s music. He’s written some amazing songs. But I don’t think he deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature. Maybe in songwriting, but that category doesn't exist. And now he says he will not attend the awards ceremony, which shows extreme disrespect and is further prove that he doesn't deserve the award. There are many little-known authors who should be recognized and given global attention by that high honor.  Was there no one else to whom they could have given such a prestigious prize? If not, then it should have been withheld for this year. The Literature Prize has now been cheapened, and it has lost much of its value by this one act of disregard for the highest possible standards of literary art.

Too Many Books

Too many books are being published today, placing too great a demand on the modern reader’s time. Why does humanity need so many? The truth is that we don’t really need 90% of them. If far fewer books were published then we could focus on the ones that really matter. In the prologue to the second part of Don Quixote Cervantes writes: “For I know very well what the temptations of the Devil are, and one of his greatest is to put it into a man’s head that he can write and print a book, and gain both money and fame but it . . .”  He goes on to say that “bad books are harder than rocks.” We might say today that it is not the devil who puts the idea of writing a book for money and fame into someone’s head, but rather it is a kind of madness. That madness has overtaken many well-intentioned people who, like Don Quixote himself, are afflicted by a delusion, the delusion that they can write a book of importance which should be published.