In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Ru Marshall’s American Trickster is an exhaustively researched and fascinating biography of Carlos Castaneda.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Marshall reveals in this detailed, well-documented, and revelatory biography, early suspicions . . . that Castaneda’s writings are mostly, if not entirely, fictional.”
In their own words, here is Ru Marshall’s Book Notes music playlist for their book American Trickster:
I often listen to music while I write—but not the music I’ve included in this playlist (almost all of which would be far too distracting). The songs I’ve chosen are those which I’ve imagined appearing on a fantasy soundtrack for an imagine film about Carlos Castaneda, songs that evoke various people and places that appear in the book. A brief synopsis so that what follows has some context: Castaneda was a faux-anthropologist at UCLA who, at the tail end of the psychedelic sixties, pulled off the greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century. His admirers ranged from Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Gilles Deleuze to Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan, who wrote that Castaneda “brought in a new level of awareness” that Castaneda wielded words “like a machete.” For five years his work went largely unchallenged—not until Joyce Carol Oates questioned whether his books were in fact novels did his reputation start to fade. In his second act, he became the leader of a cult; he and his “witches” taught Tensegrity, a movement technique they claimed offered the possibility of eternal life. American Trickster is also the story of the women who were pulled into his web, five of whom disappeared following his death and are widely believed to have taken their own lives to follow him into the next dimension.
“Carnavalito (Humahuanqueño)” by Sukay
Castaneda was born and raised in the then remote Peruvian city of Cajamarca, high in the Andes. Cajamarca was the site of perhaps the most pivotal encounter in Peruvian history—that between the conquistador Francisco Pizarro and the Incan emperor Atahualpa, whom Pizarro had strangled in the Plaza de Armas, some one hundred yards from the location of the house where Castaneda was born. No event is more important in Cajamarca than Carnival (Cajamarca’s is the largest and most fantastic in Peru). “Carnavalito, (El Humahuaqueño)” written by Edmundo Zaldivar, performed here by the Andean folk music band Sukay, beautifully evokes how grief and celebration are woven together in Andean culture: “because I’m unhappy/I live crying/Pum, pum carnavalito/all the people come dance.” Indeed, in carnival, indigenous and catholic symbolism merge, and there’s a vast literature on Carnival as a reenactment of historical trauma and mode of resistance. When Castaneda was growing up, months, if not the entire year, would be spent in preparation, making the masks that everyone would wear. People would transform into animals; devil masks were particularly popular, and the features of these devils were those of the conquerors. In my book, I try to explore how historical trauma is passed down; noth masks and devils would be central to Castaneda’s work. Though the importance of the latter was, at first, quite deeply concealed.
“The Old Revolution” by Leonard Cohen
I titled the first part of American Trickster after Leonard Cohen’s The Old Revolution. Castaneda’s parents, Susana and César Nemesio Arana, were Apristas, followers of the revolutionary leftist leader Victor Raul Haya de la Torre. Their revolution failed, the family had to go into hiding, and this experience was one of the factors that led Castaneda to a philosophy that disdained collective action, to the belief that the true revolution was internal, a transformation of personal consciousness. While writing American Trickster, I began to feel great empathy for Castaneda’s parents, in particular for Susana; I titled the book’s opening section The Old Revolution after a song by Leonard Cohen, in which he sings “I was very young then/and thought that we were winning.” American Trickster begins with the failed revolution of Castaneda’s parents, but is also very much about the failed idealism of his followers, and how that idealism was betrayed. It was for this reason that Cohen’s song resonated deeply for me.
“Jungla” by Yma Sumac
Yma Sumac, Castaneda’s near contemporary, rose to fame in the 1950s on the strength of her near five octave vocal range and her exoticized self-presentation (she was marketed by Hollywood as an Incan princess, the descendent of the Emperor Atahualpa). By the time I first encountered her music in the 1980s, she had become a gay camp icon, and was widely rumored to be, in reality, “Amy Camus” from Brooklyn. (A signed poster from a performance I went to is among my prized possessions.) I was thus surprised and delighted when, on my first trip to Peru in 2011, I learned that she had, in fact, grown up just outside of Cajamarca. And is, in all likelihood, after Castaneda, Cajamarca’s most famed cultural export. She was three years older than Carlos. Did their paths cross? Unknowable, but not improbable. She was born Zoila Chávarri Castillo; like Carlos, who was born César Arana, hers is a tale of fabulous self-reinvention, predicated in no small part on North American gullibility and her audience’s need to exoticize an “Indian” other. This song, “Jungla,” is Sumac at her over-the-top best.
“White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane
I chose this 1967 song for reasons obvious and not. “White Rabbit,” which appears on the album “Surrealistic Pillow,” is based on images from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Despite the not-entirely-convincing denials of singer Grace Slick, it was widely understood as an anthem of the psychedelic era.
That’s the obvious level. There are others. Certainly Castaneda’s readers often felt they had gone down a rabbit hole. Those who knew him personally sometimes felt like they had ended up in an incomprehensible, upside-down world. I too, writing about Carlos, often felt lost. So there’s that. Also of significance: the song is possibly equally well remembered for having provided the title to the 1971 book Go Ask Alice, which was marketed as the diary of an anonymous young woman’s hellish descent into drug addiction. It was later revealed that it was, like Castaneda’s books, a novel that had been marketed as nonfiction (the author, Beatrice Sparks, is reported to have been a Mormon youth counselor and serial con artist).
“Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” by Joni Mitchell
The lyrics to this song which appears onthe 1976 album of the same name, are among her most cryptic and obscure. Try as I might, I can’t puzzle them out. Suffice to note that don Juan was the name of Castaneda’s fictional shaman, who, in his books, instructs the young anthropologist not just in the use of peyote, mushrooms, and datura, but also in a mode of consciousness that, supposedly, had never before been shared with a “westerner.” Mitchell’s biographer, David Yaffe, calls the entire album “a response to Carlos Castaneda,” and suggests that the following words from his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, had particular meaning for Joni: “The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.”
“La Dolce Vita” by Nino Rota
Perhaps no episode in Castaneda’s story is more unsettling than that of his encounter with the great director Federico Fellini. Fellini, a devoted fan, had, for years, been trying to contact Carlos; he wanted to obtain the film rights to his books. Finally, in 1984, he was able to make contact. Fellini, who rarely left Italy, flew to Los Angeles to meet Carlos, who then sent him on a wild goose chase through Mexico in search of don Juan. The humiliating and (at least in Fellini’s mind) supernatural events that occurred during this trek would haunt Fellini for the rest of his life. Thus this track from the soundtrack to Fellini’s masterpiece, La Dolce Vita.
“Fame” by David Bowie
Castaneda had, before the 1968 publication of The Teaching of Don Juan, taken significant strides down a very dark path. But his sudden ascent to international fame in the wake of The Teachings of Don Juan confirmed his darkest intuitions. It showed him that he was indeed, as he had covertly suggested in the opening pages of that book, “the chosen man.” The chosen student of a teacher who we learn—if we read with care—is a diablero. A sorcerer in service to the forces of darkness. Who is rewarded for his Faustian pact by being given tremendous power. But whose fate is now locked in. Hence this song.
“Went to see the Gypsy” by Bob Dylan
In the 1990s, Castaneda emerged as a full-on cult leader. Followers were instructed to leave behind families, jobs, friends. He and his three “witches,” Florinda Donner, Taisha Abelar, and Carol Tiggs held seminars around the world, teaching Tensegrity, a movement technique they claimed had been passed down by twenty five generations of Toltec shamans. The movements were, in fact, often arrived at in a hotel room shortly before they went on stage. In Went to see the Gypsey, Bob Dylan’s problematically titled but nevertheless concise and evocative song, the narrator goes to see “the gypsy”—substitute, if you will, “guru” or “cult leader,” who is “staying in a big hotel.” In a dark and crowded room, the gypsy makes cryptic remarks. The narrator goes downstairs to make a phone call. There he encounters a “pretty dancing girl” who encourages him to go back up to the gypsy. The gypsy, she tells him, “can drive you from your fear.” And, as he did in Vegas. He can “bring you through the mirror.” The narrator returns to the gypsy’s room, but the gypsy has gone. This song beautifully captures the fleeting razzle dazzle showmanship of Castaneda’s group in the 90s, and the devotion of the young Tensegrity instructors who surrounded him.
“Sinnerman” by Nina Simone
Castaneda, early in his life, having read Nietzsche, made the choice to reject all conventional morality. This led him down a very dark road. In writing American Trickster, I had to grapple with the question of evil. What is it? From whence does it arise? I have no answers (other than that it seems to me inextricable from pride, which is always the flip side of shame). I do, however, have songs. One of which is Sinnerman, written by Les Baxter and Will Holt, immortalized in a recording made by Nina Simone in 1965 at the height of the civil rights movement. During his final months, at the same time that he was encouraging his followers to leave with him for the next dimension, it seems that he was also, at moments, trying to find another form of redemption (even the evil are filled with contradictions). He reached out to a former disciple, asking her forgiveness. That was something, she told him, she could not provide. Only the higher power that he’d spent his life rejecting could provide that. Simone’s sinnerman, facing final judgment, seeks refuge behind a rock. But the rock will not hide him. He seeks refuge from a river. But the river will not hide him. “So I run to the Lord,” the sinnerman sings. “Please hide me Lord.” But the Lord will not. “Go to the Devil,” the Lord commands. Although my book will be understood as highly critical of Castaneda—and more relevantly, of those in the publishing industry and academia who abetted (and continue to abet) his deception—I also believe he was, in the end, a deeply tormented soul.
Ru Marshall’s novel, A Separate Reality, was released by Carroll & Graf in 2006 and was nominated for a Lambda Award for debut fiction. Their writing has appeared in Salon, N + 1 online, The Evergreen Review, The Kenyon Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Waxwing, The Barcelona Review, Your Impossible Voice, Another Chicago Magazine, and many other publications. They have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received the 2016 Hazel Rowley Prize from BIO, the Biographers International Organization. Their visual work has been exhibited at Participant Inc., Jennifer Baahng Gallery, Studio 10 Gallery, Art in General, White Columns, Baxter Street, Cathouse Proper, and numerous other venues. They have received grants and fellowships from Macdowell, Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.