If you think, "I breathe," the "I" is extra. There is no you to say "I." What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale or when we exhale.
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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.
Yeah, so, just two pictures that I thought go nicely together. One is the work of Scott Beseler from the streets of Covington, Kentucky; the other is one of Stanley's C-ville finds.
I now believe that what most interested me in the novel, was to tell the story of a family obsessed by incest.
— Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Interview with Claude Couffon, 1968
Incest is all over the place in 100 Years of Solitude, practically every narrative block contains an incestuous relationship or one that hints at incestuous desires. I wonder what it is doing, what it is signifying? I've always sort of thought of this novel as being about the history of Colombia and about the Spanish conquest of Latin America; I'm not sure what role incest (or inbreeding, or incest and inbreeding as metaphor) plays there. Likely, of course, not a simple metaphor...
It was interesting to watch Máncora last night, a recent Peruvian film about (among other things) an incestuous relationship, and have GarcÃa Márquez in the back of my mind while I was watching it. Not much similarity at all between the two works or between the uses of incest in the two works, but fun to think about how the two different authors are using this device for their own ends. Looks like it's a bit of a central theme for this filmmaker, Ricardo de Montreuil; his other movie is called My Brother's Wife.
(...and now all of a sudden I am thinking about Ada...)
I am glad to have seen the note though, since it led me to reread the story of Jacob (Genesis 27 - 35, roughly), a story which I had by and large forgotten, in the kjv translation and in Crumb's illustrated version, and because I found Blake's painting of Jacob's Ladder -- highly productive weekend research! Reading about Jacob's travels back and forth across what would one day be the Holy Land, I felt distressed -- and remembered feeling this same distress in years past -- by the sheer universality of bad faith in the characters' dealings with one another; a bad faith that seems to me to be most pronounced among those who are identified as blessed by God. Just to take a few of the most brazen, least sympathetic instances --
(This happens in an earlier chapter, but very much setting the tone for the stories to come) Isaac tells the Philistines, when he and Rebekah are staying with them, that Rebekah is his sister rather than his wife, apparently in the expectation that they will rape her but will not molest him. When this deception is exposed, Abimelech shows himself to be just and honorable, forbidding his subjects from troubling either Isaac or his wife. What is this doing in the Hebrew people's national mythology?
Jacob, at his mother Rebekah's urging, deceives Isaac into giving him the blessing intended for his brother Esau. (This scene strikes me as pretty comical -- why should the lord's blessing be such a limited resource? Is a blessing bestowed under false pretenses even theologically binding?)
Rebekah deceives Isaac into thinking she is concerned about the lack of non-Caananite brides for Jacob locally, so that Isaac will send Jacob away and he'll be safe from Esau's vengeance.
Laban deceives Jacob by sending in Leah in place of Rachel on their wedding night. (And again I am befuddled -- what is Rachel's take on this? Leah years later accuses Rachel of stealing her husband, but that does not seem to be consistent with the rest of the narrative.)
Jacob and Laban deceive one another many times over in the matters of what Jacob will be paid and how Laban's flocks will be managed.
Etc. -- it just goes on and on. These characters seem to have no uplifting or redeeming qualities aside from their association with the Creator. What the deceptions all seem to have in common is their being inspired by fear and/or greed; I have to wonder what is the function of a national mythology showing its protagonists as being motivated primarily by fear and greed. (And note -- sure lots of national mythologies have deceitful trickster gods in them; but my untutored impression is that when e.g. Anansi deceives someone, it is done in good humor and with a sort of Koanic effect. I don't see that kind of thing operating here.)
posted afternoon of March 27th, 2011: 1 response ➳ More posts about The Bible
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...
posted morning of March 20th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
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.
