Saturday, February 24, 2018

Reading Journal


By Claudia Pineiro, translated by Miranda France
Bitter Lemon press, London, 2013
218 pgs

There is a new section in the NY Times book review where people write in to get book suggestions.  It’s called Match Book- like Match.com, it pairs people up with books.  Cleaver isn’t it?

On January 16th, a woman wanted to read books from around the world, not white people traveling in exotic places type travel books, but plots taking place in other countries written by the native author.  I keep hearing my mother in law, Harriet Spiller’s voice saying “get with the natives!” as I perused the list of books.

A Crack in the Wall is one of the mysteries that was suggested in the book review.  The story takes place in Argentina, and follows the interior monologue of an architect who has a secret.  There’s a dead body, a sexy coworker, young ingénue and the film noir layout was suspenseful enough for me to read quickly.  I have never been to Argentina, and the translation made it feel not too foreign, similar issues of real estate infighting, gentrification and greed were parallel to our own environment.  The only thing that felt “foreign” were in the translation, such as a university was called the faculty; as in “a fellow student at the faculty”.   And I felt as though I were sight seeing on the streets of Buenos Aires, as the protagonist Pablo Simo takes us to the streets with his young photographer love interest.

Thursday, February 15, 2018

Reading Journal:


Nick Hornby
Riverhead Books, 1995
323 pages

Yesterday one of my students told me he is binge-watching Dynasty.  Wait, WHAT???? Isn’t that 80’s decadent glamour soap?  Yeah, he says, it’s a remake.  I just read an article in something about how there are so many remakes of 80’s and 90‘s TV shows; One Day at a time- with an updated Latina cast,  Fuller House- older same cast without the twins, Will and Grace, older and still gay, but less taboo of being gay.  This is happening because the people who grew-up watching these shows are now the producers and executives of television, and thus the nostalgia of their youth are being relived for the next generation.  But really, Dynasty? 

So in the same nostalgic vein, I re-read another book from my past:  Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. Then continuing on my nostalgic track, I re-watched the movie with the same title, starring John Cusack and Jack Black.  This is the equivalent of chick-lit for dudes, dude-lit.  Making top five lists, angst of relationship foibles, slacker dude being unsure of his future along with his oddball friends, sleeping around, etc. 

This book, just like Catcher in the Rye, is a period piece, and seemed very sophomoric to revisit in my middle age years.  The movie however, was enjoyable to watch, (especially Jack Black in his breakout roll) even though the setting had changed from London to Chicago.

Monday, February 12, 2018

Reading Journal: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu


By Joshua Hammer
Simon & Schuster
2016

This is what I knew off hand about Mali:  That Ali Farka Toure is/was from there.  I started listening to his music- back when it was called “world music” when I used to frequent SOB’s with Christine. I liked the music, but never really researched the people who made the music.

This is what I knew about Timbuktu: a remote location often compared to bum-fuck, as in I never see them anymore, they moved out to Timbuktu…or they moved out to bum-fuck.  Sad western education.
Africa is a continent, not a country, and must be reminded of often, even if it is a common slip of the tongue, and we should know better.  So I did not know much about Timbuktu.

As I wrote in my Holiday card this year, we are destined to repeat our horrible histories, and this book really proves that point. 

500 years before the Nazis destroyed books there was a highly civilized literate society in Timbuktu. The books that were being destroyed were not just paperbacks with risqué materials in them, nor even  printed Gutenberg style books.  The books we are talking about were the hand scribed and meticulously illuminated one of a kind books, and these books were hidden in ditches, holes dug in the desert sand, in caves and people‘s backyards to be hidden from the religious madmen, it’s always religion that creates stupidity isn’t it?.  Imagine digging out  a 13th century illuminated manuscript in your backyard.

page 212
Timbuktu as a paragon of moderation and intellectual ferment that had fallen victim to a once-in-a- millennium conflagration.  Timbuktu had witnessed the killings of scholars by the Emperor Sunni Ali in the 1300s, the rise of the anti-Semitic preacher Muhammed Al Maghili in the 1490s, the edicts of King Askia Mohammed banning and imprisoning Jews during that same decade, and the implementation of Shariah law in Timbuktu by the jihadis in the early and mid-1800s.  …constant state of flux, periods of openness and liberalism followed by waves of intolerance and repression…anti-intellectualism, religious purification, and barbarism had coursed through the city repeatedly over the preceding five centuries.”

Those in power rewrite history to make their point, progress their ideas, make excuses for their bad behavior.  The white men who kidnapped a culture of Africans to become enslaved lied to themselves, and those around them to justify their actions.
 for example:
Western white men declared that “Negroes….to be naturally inferior to the whites, no ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences”   

Hegel (remember that philosopher we were forced to read in 1st year philosophy class?) said “Africa had no indigenous system of writing, no historical memory, and no civilization.  (they are) Unhistorical, Undeveloped."

The untrue absence of books and literature in the African continent proved that Negros were savages, and thus ok to enslave them.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu knew a different fact.  One man in particular, Abdel Kader Haidara, was entrusted with his fathers library of manuscripts, a large portion of them were illuminated scribed texts on astronomy, medicine, and other sciences that were written 1300-1400s.  Haidara and his colleagues knew that if these books were destroyed, the history of his country would be as well.   

I learned a lot about this part of the world, all the fucked up shit that happens with religious fundamentalists, the conflict of ideals within each religion and the amazing history of one African nation, and made me think what else was going on in the vast continent.  This amount of scholarly research, and literacy couldn’t have been isolated only to Mali.  There must have been so many other pockets of civilization that existed and probably wiped out before Europeans could discover it. 
Sad, so sad. 

 

Monday, February 5, 2018

Reading Journal: White Teeth and The Music Shop

Vintage Books, 2000
448pgs

A huge undertaking of a debut novel, this paperback edition has moved with my library many times.  I don't even remember how the story ended when I picked it up again last month, thought I did remember the hilarious beginning, and could see in my minds eye, the Halal butcher wielding his knife at the mess of pigeons.

The unearthed bookmark in it, is a boarding pass from JFK to Heathrow Airport, sometime in March, of what year I am also not certain.  But I deduce that at the time of this first reading, I was dating an American sculptor who had grown-up in England (Ealing to be exact) and I must have been going to visit his family for spring break and though I visited the Romer family often, I’m sure we probably broke up not too long after I read this book. Because of these visits, I realize, Ealing has always been a ramshackle, immigrant filled neighborhood, even though Zadie Smith's narrative takes place in Willesden Green, six miles from Ealing.  

I’d forgotten all the “big” issues, that were contained in this book.  Colonialism, Cross racial marriages and friendships, war buddies hashing over their youth in a Irish-named Arab owned bar, history of the Pakistani uprising against the British, conflicts of religion (mainly Hindus, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslim fundamentalists called KEVIN with an unfortunate acronym problem), genetic engineering, animal rights activists, issues of children of immigrant parents, separation of twins, and so much more.  The whole time as I read, I was amazed at how such a young author (age 25 at the time of publishing) could tackle so much and write from so many different viewpoints.   

Though the writing was a pleasure to ingest, it was hard for me to keep up, and I could sense many chapters as being submitted to the New Yorker as stand alone chapters for the young fiction issues.

I reserved a few more Zadie Smith books from the library; Swing Time the most recently published book now sits on my nightstand.  Then I remember that I had vowed not to read any books by one author in a row.  Last year I spent most of my reading time going through all the books written by a single author in one go, and found it to be too confusing:  Richard Russo- The Bridge of Sighs, Empire Falls, Nobody’s Fool, That Old Cape Magic….and after the third book, I found myself getting thoroughly confused at which characters belonged in which book.  The tone of writing was so familiar that timelines and characters easily became jumbled in my mind; Lucy from The Bridge of Sighs could easily have been cavorting with Miles Roby.  Even the most disparate settings and reading audiences from one author such as JK Rowling could get mixed up; Casual Vacancy and Harry Potter, one being a grown up version of the other…though reading Rowling through the eyes of her pseudonym Robert Galbraith was a bit different in tone.

I’ve just realized that unconsciously, and unpurposefully, I’ve been reading books that take place in England.  (With Hiro, I’ve been reading Neil Gaiman; Coroline and now The Graveyard Book)

Random House, 2017
306 pgs

Another British import, this novel was plowed through in a single day.  Just as the title suggests, it was a lovely weaving of music throughout the narrative, classical, jazz, blues, classic rock, pop, everything.  The author writes as she speaks, starting thoughts and sentences, but leaving them unfinished for you to guess at and later understand.  The location is an old dodgy street, and has the small town feel of the little shop around the corner.  It is a book that will probably mention Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity in every review, though instead of mixed tapes, we have a lover of vinyl.  The soundtrack is great, though after reading this book, you can’t listen to it as background music, it must be paid attentioned to while lying on the floor with your eyes closed.