Newsroom-l Public Journal

American family's candid guide to Cancun is updated for 2005

Cancun User's Guide 2005
By Jules Siegel with Anita Brown and Faera, Eli and Jesse Siegel
$17.58, 204 pages, 6 in. x 9 in., color cover, fully illustrated

The Cancun User's Guide 2005 contains 204 densely packed pages of candid advice, recommendations and cultural information written in a clear, popular style, and illustrated with photographs, drawings and maps. It will not only help readers save money and have more fun when visiting Cancun, but also understand Mexico better.

Celebrated writer Jules Siegel (Playboy, Best American Short Stories, San Francisco Chronicle) and his family have been living and working in Cancun since 1983. Cancun is not just a tourism resort, Jules Siegel explains, but a brilliant example of modern Mexican economic planning and social engineering.

More than half the text is devoted to the Cancun Directory, in which the Siegels share their vast store of local survival secrets in a detailed alphabetical listing filled with personal tips that other guide books rarely cover. The book has the same mordant honesty and ferocious humor as Siegel's articles and fiction in cutting edge publications such as the Village Voice and Rolling Stone.

When the Siegels left the United States in 1981, he had an assignment to do the Playboy Interview with then-president José López-Portillo, not a trivial task, as it turned out. He writes, "I gave up on in 1989 that after a presidential security guard commiserated, 'Siempre dicen sí; nunca dicen cuando.'-- 'They always say yes, but the never say when.' I guess Playboy is a little too risque for Mexican presidents." Meanwhile, Jules had returned to his original trade of graphic design to survive.

"We were broke a lot of the time, had innumerable scrapes with greedy landlords and rapacious employers," Siegel writes. "I went to jail for three days, falsely accused of fraud. Justice triumphed, fortunately. The jail was one of those experiences you really need to write a book like this, but not one that you tend to look for with the same zeal as a Playboy Interview with a head of state."

Unlike other guides, the Cancun User's Guide is revised frequently and printed on demand. The content is always current. The third edition, which went on sale on Jan. 2, 2005, has already been revised twice to include new recommendations. "The book you have is the book we lived," Jules says. "We're still living it, so the book is always growing."

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First novel about a rape grabs attention hard

"A Journey Through the Penumbra: Out of Rape's Shadow"
Epidauros Press, Naperville, IL
$12.95, 160 pgs.

Cassandra Juarez, a licensed professional counselor who treats trauma victims, assembles a series of possibly too-familiar iconic working class Catholic incidents into a surprisingly effective fictional study of sexual repression, rape, family violence and their consequences. She's an excellent observer who depicts her gritty midwestern terrain with great force. She tells her story with relentless drive that captured me against my will. I'm sure that she'll eventually come to the attention of a mainstream publisher, and I look forward to reading the results.

Fabled cartoonist Will Eisner dead at 87

How I met Will Eisner

By Jules Siegel

From Mad laughter: Fragments of a Life in Progress. Illustrations used by permission of Will Eisner

Meanwhile, in what we might call real life, the account executive for Aunt Jemima Pancake Houses asked me to design Aunt Jemima handkerchiefs and aprons and hire black people to distribute them in front of the Aunt Jemima Pancake House in Jamaica, Queens. I should explain that it was then predominantly black. I talked him out of it, but doubts entered my mind. Were these people entirely sane? I decided that although the salaries were lower, I might be better off in the publishing industry. Although I specialized in political and corporate public relations, I had a spectacular success doing the publicity for the first American edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. I arranged for Norris McWhirter, one of the authors, to appear on thirty two television and radio interviews in ten days. That sort of feat is common now, but I was then a pioneer in using mass market editorial publicity for a book.

David A. Boehm, the publisher, introduced me to Will Eisner, the fabled cartoonist who created The Spirit. Will was then packaging troop information materials for the Defense Department and had just been named executive vice-president of Koster-Dana Publishing Corporation, a kind of mini-conglomerate that owned the Good Reading Rack Service, a publisher of employee relations propaganda. Koster-Dana had just purchased North American Newspaper Alliance, the nation's largest news and feature service, which operated in symbiosis with the Bell-McClure service (Drew Pearson's Washington Merry-Go-Round and Mutt and Jeff were among the offerings here) and the Women's News Service. Koster-Dana also had an operation that produced promotional literature for banks and financial institutions.

Eisner is the American Hiroshige, a master draftsman with an absolutely original eye. He has been called the most influential cartoonist of the 20th Century. The Spirit, which he started when he was only nineteen, was a classic syndicated private eye spoof that influenced Stan Lee of Marvel Comics in his particular brand of self-kidding zaniness and formed the three-dimensional drawing style of Harvey Kurzman.

Every military ordnance man and quartermaster is familiar with P. S., a monthly magazine on maintenance of equipment, produced by Eisner and his staff. His drawings of Jeeps and helicopters and arcane segments of 155 mm. Howitzers were living animals begging for attention with eyes and mouths superbly elicited from existing features such as headlights and much less obvious ones too subtle to describe. Will later went on to invent the graphic novel, serious fiction in cartoon form, a genre that achieved academic respectability when Art Spiegelman's Mauschwitz won a Guggenheim.

Eisner recognized that I was a potential talent but thought Jules was too Jewish a name, although he was Jewish, too. And so I became Jim to all at Koster-Dana including Sid Goldberg who was then the editor of N.A.N.A.. For years afterward he used to call me Jim even though I begged him to stop. Good Reading Rack pamphlets were distributed by large corporations such as General Motors on reading racks in employee lounges. Legally, a corporation may not directly over-propagandize its workers. The Good Reading Rack Service was an independent company whose function was to help the corporation evade the law.

In fact, when I was there the reading rack buyer at General Motors exercised so much control in the creation of the booklets that it was difficult to consider the service truly independent. I was unconcerned with ideas. All philosophies were interchangeable. I was a liberal Democrat when I voted. In real life, I was in love with the printing press and its products, obsessed with creating elegant documents, knowing the names of hundreds of typefaces and, in many cases, familiar with the lives of designers -- Bodoni, Garamond, Goudy, Caslon. The words were abstractions. I was as pure an artist as I will ever be. I did not care very much about meaning and was in love with form. If being called Jim was a condition of getting at the controls of the machine that was fine with me. I was not a hypocrite. I just didn't care.

The Good Reading Rack Service put out 56 booklets a year, distributed in monthly packets of four or five. Three would be in some way useful: cooking recipes, safety hints, inspirational messages, gardening tips, personal economic advice about such topics as car buying, installment loans, life insurance information. The fourth was economic propaganda -- the Building Economic Understanding series, crude and dumb, not quite up to the level of the religious tracts you find in stores owned by devout Southern Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists. Eisner had been brought in to bring it all up to date.

The prejudices and emotional problems of business executives make them very difficult to work with. They prefer stupidity to excellence because it is safer. Employee relations literature had to look dumb and sound dumb because it made the executives feel better to think that the workers were dumb. The workers were not dumb. They were merely unfortunate. It was my belief that 99% of them were too smart to be influenced by any company propaganda. The other one per cent could be influenced through their desire to ascend the ladder of success and become executives. This required intelligent but simple materials that would give them insights into the party line.

I attempted to change the service by using more classical designs, aiming at American Heritage and the publications of the Museum of Modern Art, with appropriately clear and, I hoped, intelligent text. Will brought to the booklets he produced a sense of humor that was almost as much fun as The Spirit. Well, that all went over like the proverbial turd in the punch bowl at Good Reading Rack Service, even though our booklets sold better than the old ones.

I left to free-lance. Eisner was later forced out and took American Visuals with him, but he made a great deal of money buying and selling his own company.