Mark Plimsoll writes of our internal Foreign Affairs- where palm-fronds shade the moonlight that shines on three American continents of minks and mules, "coyo-lobos", cabrones and chupacabras. Plimsoll describes how tourists try to become travelers; the "Roman Golden Rule" - When in Rome, do unto others like Romans do each other." His pages resonate with keyhole snapshots of realities in collision, we turn each page and relish fresh discoveries about:
The callow youth stuck in dire straights (WMD Machete)
The Techno-nerd enslaved by passionate Wiccans (Godless Goddess)
The baby-boomer menopausic male who indulges his James Bond fantasies as he buddies up with a Mexican playboy to slum their way across Mexico (Zone of Zilence)
The older American male who attempts to find his traditional Old World foreign bride (Four Springs)
The Gaugain-like odysseys of expatriated artists (WMD Machete, Virgin Malinche)
Polyglot salespeople who receive pep talks before dawn to become the suction pads for tourists victimized by corporate bloodsuckers. (TimeShare)
This "Magic Realism" mirrors our own "foreign" cultures
as Mark Plimsoll (whose streamlined and almost cinematically colored prose introduces
what some call "a new and better English called E") knocks the
hot air out of academic prose with quick swashes in present tense. He
paints the exit sign for an overloaded world, a glimpse of a Third World reality
where the romance of human nature reminds us of all that the modern world forgot.
"Mark Plimsoll unearths our collective unconscious of future
horror,
trapped in the dilemma that contrasts chauvinisms and
ethnocentricity with the reality of modern multi-culturalism.
Each of us shares the deep knowledge of our own culture's superiority,
until
we see through Plimsoll-colored glasses, and re-inherit the world."
MA R K P L I M S O L L
The self-styled philosopher / humorist Mr.
Plimsoll might be a woman, one of the original Gringo Locos, who emulates the
leftist Traven married to the utopian Gauguin. An easily approachable Postmodernist
expatriot when not on some repetitious drunken brag to tourists, he/she practices
the Zen of Total Immersion in a foreign culture to examine one's own navel.
Independent wealth and fluency in Spanish finance a continual soujourn through
the Americas. Plimsoll deserves a Doctorate in Latino and Wasp Behavior, with
a minor in the Killer Bees of the Elitist Model of Government. Plimsoll regularly
wins literary competitions, dabbles in didactic art to appease his inner radical
polemicist, and enjoys memberships in various writing organizations. Plimsoll's
life, continually threatened, keeps him on his toes- if I'm thinking about the
right person, that is.