At first I didn't quite know what I would do with the book, other than read it over and over again. My distrust of history then was still strong, and I wanted to concentrate on the story for its own sake, rather than on the manuscript's scientific, cultural, anthropological, or 'historical' value. I was drawn to the author himself.
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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I read a lot this past week about the fire at Triangle Shirtwaist Factory -- and this is a piece of American history that I consider part of common knowledge, something that people (taking myself as an example) are likely to know about without their having any detailed familiarity with the history of the labor movement in the US. (And indeed I did not know a crucial bit of this piece of history until this week, namely that two years prior to the fire, the Triangle company had successfully broken an effort by its workers to unionize.) Of course it is dangerous to extrapolate from my own experience and knowledge to that of people around me. But I want to pursue this for a minute.
Lessie Jo Frazier talks in Salt in the Sand about the process of institutional memory in Chile, whereby the massacre at St. Mary's School of Iquique is remembered as a totem, as a way of forgetting similar repressive events in the history of Chile's labor movement. This is making me wonder if there's a similar process in place here in the US, whereby one factory fire stands in for a whole class of events, a whole period of history, and what memories are lost in this process, what distortions are introduced. I ultimately don't have much to say about this -- I am not a historian and as I say am extrapolating totally from my own experience -- but thought it might be useful to throw out there.
Take a moment to commemorate the passing of 146 garment workers in a factory in Greenwitch Village one hundred years ago today. Read Sec'y Solis' observations about what this anniversary means for exploited workers today. And take some time to read about the intimidation critics of the Republican agenda are facing in Wisconsin, and about the organizational clout behind that agenda.
posted evening of March 25th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Politics
10And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran. 11And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep.
12And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.
13And, behold, the lord stood above it, and said, I am the lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed;
14And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
15And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.
16And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the lord is in this place; and I knew it not. 17And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. 18And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. 19And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first.
-- Genesis 28 (kjv)
—Está bien, Prudencio —le dijo—. Nos iremos de este pueblo, lo más lejos que podamos, y no regresaremos jamás. Ahora vete tranquilo.
And a reward, for reading all that text: Here is Alison Kraus singing about (another) Jacob's Dream.
* I am not sure what this means. Gregory Rabassa renders it literally in his translation, "and they succeeded"; but it does not mean anything in English. I am leaving it out of my translation. My best guess is that it means some of the travellers *did* die of exhaustion; but no mention of this is made elsewhere, and it seems like it would be a strange thing to throw in with no specifics. ... Got it! (Maybe) -- I think I am misreading this. I wanted "todos estaban dispuestos a morirse de viejos" to mean, "they were ready to drop dead of exhaustion" so I ignored the meaning of the words; viejos is old age, not exhaustion. So estaban dispuestos means "they were ready/prepared" in the sense of what they were planning to do, not what they were about to do -- they meant to die of old age, not to die on the journey. "(and they succeeded)" -- i.e. they did die of old age, years later, not on the journey. I think Rabassa's translation is very unclear. I modified my translation above.
Update: Some further thinking about Jacob (and Macondo) here.
In 2004 the Cassini spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn; ever since it has been sending back majestic images of the planet and her moons and her rings. Now the Cassini Imaging Team has digitized thousand of those images and compiled them into a movie of Cassini's flight -- click the image above to watch. Thanks for the link, Gary.
Bolaño names Camus' The Fall as the book "that saved me from hell and plummeted me straight back down again... After Camus, everything changed." He stole his copy of The Fall from the LibrerÃa Cristal by "carrying it out in plain sight of all the clerks, which is one of the best ways to steal and which I had learned from an Edgar Allan Poe story" -- only to have it confiscated later by security guards at another bookstore.
Very nice bit in this story about meeting Mexican authors on the Calle del Niño Perdido, the Street of the Lost Boy, "a teeming street that my maps of Mexico City hide from me today, as if Niño Perdido could only have existed in my imagination, or as if the street, with its underground stores and street performers had really been lost, just as I got lost at the age of sixteen." It is not on modern maps because the street has been renamed the Eje Central Lázaro Cárdenas; but the street's old name has a romantic story behind it, per Ritos y Retos del Centro Historico.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano BuendÃa would remember that distant afternoon when his father had taken him to learn about ice.
Ellen and I have decided to start reading a book together -- one I have read before, one that she is reading for the first time, the book which inspired this blog's butterfly logo. She is reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in translation, I'll be reading Cien años de soledad in the original. Our goal is to read one chapter every week, and my goal is to post notes on the week's chapter every weekend.
Why now? Why GarcÃa Márquez?... Just happenstance I guess. I've been carrying the book around in my backpack lately, reading bits of it on the train in to work, savoring the language and the imagery. Yesterday I mentioned it to Ellen and asked if she had ever read it; she has not but said she'd be interested in reading it if I have the translation. And lo and behold, I do! Looking forward to sharing it...
Happy Birthday to Rex Broome! Broome is the singer and guitarist for Skates & Rays. On his 39th birthday last year he covered Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting for the Man"; today he covers his own tune "Pushing Forty". In between he has recorded one cover version for every day of his fortieth year of life, and/or leaned on friends to contribute their own cover versions. I'm impressed, and gratified to have played my own small part.
At South Orange Patch, Marcia Worth reports that Mario Sepulveda will be speaking at Seton Hall next week. Sepulveda is one of the copper miners who were trapped underground at Copiapó last year.
Wednesday's Letters of Note prints an exchange between Hunter S. Thompson ("Maybe you can do a cute cartoon about vultures feeding on my (absent) carcass.") and Ralph Steadman ("Don't get pompous with me. I am not one of your goddamn sychophants or acolytes.")
Some text! Let's look at two longish quotes.
Ellen and I have decided to start reading a book together -- one I have read before, one that she is reading for the first time, the book which inspired this blog's butterfly logo. She is reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in translation, I'll be reading Cien años de soledad in the original. Our goal is to read one chapter every week, and my goal is to post notes on the week's chapter every weekend.
