Oh Where Have All My Favorite Blogs Gone?

I recently added Elyse Sewell's Live Journal to my list "more things I read." She takes great pictures of food. I found her through Sassmaster and used to visit occassionally.

I feel the need to beef up my list, because it has gotten shorter due to the discontinuation of some and to the new trend of making blogs private. My Tango Year and Superblogmuch were old favorites of mine, but I missed the invitation list. Joe had a good explanation for making his Appalachian Trail adventure private, but I have not heard any reasons from the others. I hope it's not because of annoying spammers. Anybody know what's up with this unsettling trend? Synonym Master, got any for "trend?"

Talking With Ghosts in Mexico

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo is an odd little book that I liked a lot. It begins with a son travelling to the village of his birth to meet his father to fulfill his dying mother's request. You think it's going to go one direction, and then it goes somewhere else. Even after you get used to most of the characters being ghosts and you start to get a hang of the time jumping, you have to pay close attention in order to keep up.

The book came out in Mexico in 1955 and was not particularly well received. While he'd written a book of short stories prior to Pedro Paramo, Rulfo never wrote another book. He did live to see it gain popularity and be credited with beginning the movement of Magical Realism. (I would credit that source, but I've already lost track of it.) I was kind of suprised by this because I think everything I ever read by a latin american author had surreal qualities. Maybe they were all later than 1955. I find myself wondering what Rulfo did for a living since he wasn't writing books. Looks like a trip to Wikepedia.

According to reviews, the later translation is far superior to the one I read which was translated by Lysander Kemp. I still liked the book a lot. I would even consider reading it again, but only because it is so short besides being good.

Betrayal and Heartbreak In Senegal

I picked up this book last fall in Laramie when I was knocking around town with Erika before our climbing adventures in Grand Junction and Moab. It appealed to me because it was only 89 pages long. I thought it would be a good book for the road, but I couldn't seem to concentrate well enough for it. Being lightweight helped it make the cut and the moves from SD, MI, FL, and MI again. Being sick in a motel room in Alabama allowed me the quiet I seemed to need to read it. I'm glad I did.

The book, So Long a Letter, by Mariama Ba, translated by Modupe Bode-Thomas, is written in epistolary style. It takes place in Senegal, I would guess in the late 1970's. Ramatoulaye, a recent widow, writes a very long letter to her lifelong friend, Aissatou.

From the first page:

If over the years, and passing through the realities of life, dreams die, I still keep intact my memories, the salt of remembrance.

I conjure you up. The past is reborn, along with its procession of emotions. I close my eyes. Ebb and tide of feeling: heat and dazzlement, the woodfires, the sharp green mango, bitten into in turns, a delicacy in our greedy mouths. I close my eyes. Ebb and tide of images drops of sweat beading your mother's ochre-coloured face as she emerges from the kitchen, the procession of young wet girls chattering on the way back from the springs.

We walked the same paths from adolesence to maturity, where the past begets the present.

My friend, my friend, my friend, I call on you three times.

Both women were educated, professionals married to men they loved. Both had their lives torn apart by polygamy. Their situations were not the same and their reactions differed.

Reviews of this book point out the highlighting of the inequality of women in Senegalese society and the mixing of european and traditional values. It does do this, but the real strength of the book is in the very human quality of the characters. They seem like real people with distinctive personalities, strengths and foibles. They are not cardboard cutouts used to make a point. In fact, I had sympathy for everyone, even the dweeb who abandoned his wife and 12 children to chase a young skirt, who happened to be his oldest daughter's best friend. Ok, I didn't have any sympathy for one particularly treacherous mother-in-law, and I did despise the mother that more or less sold her daughter off to the old guy, but I did have sympathy for her.

It was a good read and got me thinking about human relations in general and how life doesn't necessarily turn out how one expects, but how worth it it is.

I have regained my powers

Reading Brin

I like David Brin. If I hadn't lost the ability to post images, I would show the cover of his book that I read recently, Startide Rising. It was a good read, a fine adventure in outer space. It involves a stranded spaceship with its crew of dolphins and humans. Upstarts and underdogs, this crew is being hunted by galactic zealots while struggling with mutiny in their own ranks. Really, I don't need to say anymore since I mentioned the dolphin astronauts.

another thing i have read and now will share with you

One of the hardest things in life is to be happy. Why? Because we feel that certain attributes cause happiness, and therefore we lose touch with what actual happiness signifies out side of ourselves-a sense of joy, of inner freedom. From Everyday Tao by Leonard Willougby.

I read this book last year, when, surprise, it came into the store. I am reading it again. It gives a good working sense of taoist philosophy in fairly plain language. Even so, i find i have to re-read some of the passages, not due to the writing style, but because the concepts are so simple that it is hard to grasp them, they just float up into your brain somewhere. but maybe a couple days later you will be doing something and wham, you think of it in the context of your activity, and it all makes sense. Until you realize that it doesn't.

I fininished 2 books recently

that I had picked up from the thrift store, you may recall the pictoral I did....I liked them. I am not much of a book reviewer, so I am going to just pick a few lines from each that will give a taste of the book.

from Hot Damn-by James W. Hall-a collection of essays he wrote as a regular feature for the Miami Herald. It made me wish I could live even further south,(sock-free 24-7) He writes on all things Florida, with some insight, amazement at the weirdness, and lots of affection.

Though I didn't have words for it then, I knew the light was different too.
It had an almost romantic, twilight rosiness, a quiet light, yet far more vivid and precise than any I had known before. A painterly January light. And while I had been on the platform of the Hollywood train station for less than a minute, I knew with utter certainty that I had taken a mortal wound.

From Tomcat In Love-by Tim O'Brien- a novel, very funny, about a linguistics professor with a bit of a wandering eye...divorce, revenge, betrayal, more revenge. Playful and thoughtful language, great characters. The footnotes are awesome.

If commitment comes undone, was such commitment ever commitment? By what slippery standard? What small print? What fickle sliding scale? The betrayal of love, in other words, seems also to entail a fundamental betrayal of language and logic and human reason, a subversion of meaning, a practical joke directed against the very meaning of meaning.
My mood in any case, was far from peppy.