Mis sueños

Having sent all the text for the next issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies to the copyeditor in England, I thought I could rest for a couple of days--just read books and do mindless work like shoveling snow and restacking the woodpile, partly soaked by melting snow.

But my Dream Self would have nothing of it. Since I had been reading Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas, by the musicologist Elijah Wald, I was treated last night to a editor's nightmare, in which I suddenly remembered that I was also responsible for a second journal, one on the literature of the American-Mexican border region--there is Wald's influence. In the dream, I was struggling to think of someone whom I could ask to edit the second journal, since I obviously was not keeping up with it.

Put Narcocorrido in a boxed set with Charles Bowden's Down by the River--there would be a useful combination to help you understand all the "War on (some) Drugs" craziness/locura.

From a corrido recorded by Los Hermanos Gaspar and translated by Wald:

Un compadre que yo tengo sinaloense
El me trajo la semilla de amapola,
Me dió clases por sembrarla y abonarla,
Que bonito siento andar rayando bolas.

A compadre of mine from Sinaloa,
He brought me poppy seeds,
He gave me classes in planting and fertilizing them:
How good I feel as I go along scoring pods.

(And ahí en British Colombia, what we Americans think of as el norte, perhaps someone is tuning his guitar and singing "The Ballad of BC Hydro," how it keeps the indoor grow lights burning brightly and must not be privatized.)