Yesterday I put down Doris Lessing and her impressions of the efficacy of mosquitos nets in Rhodesia and read about Martin Ramirez.(Martin should have an accent on the i by the way) He is an "outsider" artist and it's fascinating that he was from a poor little village in Los Altos en Jalisco and ended up in an insane asylum in California drawing these fantastic drawings with found pieces of paper, bits of magazines for collages and endless little repetetive lines. He also used his own spit to create some of the effects. My favorite bit of the story was how his family back at home would get these now extremely valuable works in the mail and they ended up burning them all since he was diagnosed with TB and they thought they might get sick from them! Fuchi!
It also made me want to read some more Mexican history since it talked about the Cristero War of which I knew nothing. Billy referred me to some Mexican history book that he read but we are unable to locate it on Amazon. Not sure I could read a whole book on the history of Mexico but I like to imagine that I am the type of person who would.
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