the circle game

There is always something terrifying about purchasing plane tickets, in all their stark finality:

September 12th- Fly from PDX to L.A.
- Visit Cara, Laura, other California people (Ana?)
September 16th- bus to San Luis Obispo to visit my Grandma
September 20th- bus to San Francisco
September 21st-25th- Intern training in San Francisco
September 26th- Fly from L.A. to Laredo
11pm that night CROSS BORDER INTO MEXICO (either that or sleep in the airport)
December 23rd- Fly from Laredo to PDX

August and September are gonna be some crazy months. Corey and I leave for England on August 17th. We get back on September 2nd. I work for one more week, and then I leave. AAAAAAH! Change can be scary. But change is good, I think.

I've been doing this thing since April where every day I write down in a little notebook What I Did That Day. No analysis, no introspection, just bare naked facts. My drive to record things amazes me, sometimes: how much do I really need? Paper journal, livejournal, this blog, and this notebook? Anyway, it's interesting to flip backwards and see What I Did on a certain day of the month. For example, here is What I Did on the 9th:

April 9th- sick day. Sleep a lot.

May 9th- Wake up early to go to coast with Solange and Aiden [visiting friends from Paris]. Long drive to Cannon beach. Play music from ipod. Beach windy, weather beautiful. Farmer's market in morning. Gumbo for dinner delish. Catch 4 fat mice in traps.

June 9th- Wake up from nightmare of falling in black void. Corey comforts me. Alarm at 6.20 AM. Roll out of bed and catch Max. Buy sandwiches at Safeway, $33. Big sandwich makes me sick, leave it by library for homeless. Arrive at work, program planning with Allie + Jose in Learning Center. All computers broken, I greedily grab #9, the only one that works. Trip to Starbucks with Alex for a soy latte. Talk about her caffeine overdose and hospitalization.

July 9th- Wake up late, 6.20. Bagel + coffee breakfast. Write sketch of book review and start typing up story. Take kids to Shute Park, Plaid Pantry field trip to buy seeds for bird feeders. Animal presentation by Zoo people underwhelming. Take 10-12 year olds to park in afternoon, Alexis left behind, cries. Long Max journey home. Caught without ticket by Max officer, given ticket. Cry hysterically on phone with Corey, feel better. Hang out with Laura at Laughing Planet and Hotboxx as she leaves for CA the next day.

And for an even more entertaining reference, here is What I Did in August of 2008, when we were in Ecuador!

August 9th- Rainy in morning. Wet boat ride to Cojimies, [seaside town where the Corvina or Sea Bass festival was taking place] meet up with Mariana [our tour guide friend]. 4-hour lunch. Beer and rum. [I didn't mention this, but Corey had the most amazing lunch, a soup filled with lobsters and crab and shrimp and Queen conch. Mmmmmmmmmmm.] B+J [Travel mates] leave for Quito. Corey and I watch volleyball game, dance to salsa band. Chris [other travel mate] harassed by drunk man. Bed early at 12:30pm.

Man, isn't the passage of time crazy?! I've been really fascinated with that lately: how time passes, who you were three months ago, three years ago, ten years ago. I was talking with my sister yesterday about 1999 and it's interesting the things we came up with when discussing what that year meant to us. The year we got really into movies saw Fight Club, American Beauty, Boys Don't Cry. The year we first started listening to Tori Amos. The start of 8th grade. Oh man. What do you think of, when you think of who and where you were in 1999?

Tori Amos' cover of Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game" started playing on my shuffle just now as I type this, which is a little eerie. "We're captive on a carousel of time," indeed. I like this quote from this NY Times blog on happiness, on the difficulty of happiness and being in time:

"To really live is to accept that you live “for the time being,” and to fully enter that moment of time. Living is that, not building up an identity or a set of accomplishments or relationships, though of course we do that too. But primarily, fundamentally, to live is to embrace each moment as if it were the first, last, and all moments of time... I find it impressive how thoroughly normal it is be so tentative about the time of our lives, or so asleep within it, that we miss it entirely. Most of us don’t know what it actually feels like to be alive. We know about our problems, our desires, our goals and accomplishments, but we don’t know much about our lives."

This emphasis on the present moment links in nicely with the quote from Rayuela which I used to close the last entry: "We must establish ourselves in the present once more." I think the central struggle of "Rayuela" (which I finally finished last week) is exactly that, how to fully enter the present moment of time. Oh god, I don't even know where to begin saying even a quarter of what there is to say about this book. (I feel like so many of my reviews begin with that sentiment.) I do know that I am definitely going to have to read this again. (Again, another phrase that is popping up more and more often here.) What do I say about Morelli, the author-like figure who dominates the 99 "expendable" chapters that readers "hopscotch" through?

My favorite thing about this novel was definitely the rapport between the groups of friends. Cortázar does an excellent job of capturing the rambling dialogue of friendships that have lasted a long time. This characteristic is closely related to the other aspect I liked best about the novel, which was how much it reminded me of Bolaño. As I wrote earlier, characters sitting around, drinking, bitching, wandering, pontificating: it all feels very relevant to the mid-20's, post-college lifestyle.

I have no idea where I read this (somewhere online--I swear!), but I read a quote by Cortázar, in which he said that "Rayuela" was his homage to people of his bohemian generation, and how they dealt with whole getting old and feeling irrelevant and purposeless. He also said that it was interesting that it was the young Latin American youth of the 60's who ended up really connecting with his book, as opposed to his generation. (I am gonna try to find the source for this quote, I swear.)

I dunno, it all makes me think of this letter from my favorite advice column, and how the advice he gives is really true. When I read old entries from this blog, or my paper journal, or my livejournal, or any of the 1001 ways that I've tried to record all the craziness that goes on in the small box of consciousness that I call Myself and My World, what keeps coming up for me, again and again, is how I've changed. In this case, change is definitely, definitely a good thing. I am so unspeakably and inexplicably glad and relieved that for whatever reason, over the past year I have significantly drifted away from the crushing pressure of the assumptions that Cary Tennis critiques in his column. Doing well at tasks does notbring us happiness. These preconceived, ridiculous standards and notions of what it means to "succeed" and be a successful college graduate are just... they make me want to vomit in my mouth a little. I'm smart enough to know now that it's not a game... but if it were, I'd definitely say that I'm winning. (And not in what you'd consider the traditional way, either.)

And so again: here's to not always looking to the future and instead embracing the prsent. It's Wacky Water Week with the 8 & 9-year-olds this week at the Club, and it's gonna be a week they'll never forget.

Rayuela, Part I

It's so hot in Portland right now there's little else I want to do other than sit in front of the fan and eat popsicles from the little Mexican tiendita. Corey and I will probably swallow our hypochondria and go swimming in the public pool down the street later this afternoon.

In a way, I guess it's good that this feels like an exceptionally hot summer in Portland (according to Corey and other long-time PDX dwellers; this is only the second summer I've spent in Portland). Last week I learned that for my internship in the fall with Kiva, I'll be interning with Fundación para la Vivienda Progresiva (FVP), in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. So it looks like I'm heading back to the U.S.-Mexican border after all... interesting how these things work out. I'm going to have to make myself some cut-offs and buy some more wife-beaters to prepare for life in the desert.

I like how my life's narrative is increasingly becoming defined by the quest for the random and marginal... I'm not exactly sure how all these experiences I'm seeking are supposed to add up to make a coherent, cohesive whole, but then again I'm not sure if I want it to.


This quest for the weird and marginal feels particularly relevant to me, maybe due to the current Big Book I'm reading, Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (or Hopscotch). My sister read this book way back in the day in high school, and then read it again three years ago in Spain. She told me that although she enjoyed it when she read it the first time and knew with certainty that it was a great book, she didn't "get it." As I read it for myself now, I can easily see how there's a lot of stuff here that would make a nice big whooshing sound as it flew over a ninth-grader's head (like what happenned to me and Lolita when I read it in eighth grade and totally didn't "get" the beautiful, erotic love story). I've been reading it in Spanish, and while it's been slow going, almost frustratingly so at times, it's been much more rewarding than reading it in English.

The most exciting aspect of this book is its similarity to the Choose Your Own Adventure series. As the little note by the author on the first page informs us, there are two different ways of reading the novel. In Reading #1, you can read it straight through to Chapter 56, “at the close of which are three garish little stars which stand for the words The End.” (All excerpts from the novel in English are taken from Gregory Rabassa's 1986 translation.) In Reading #2, you begin with Chapter 73 and then hop around the chapters (including Chapters 57-155, described as “expendable), based on the little number printed at the end of each chapter. If you confront the list at the beginning, the one that lists the order in which you'll read all the chapters for Reading #2, you'll discover that you'll eventually be suspended in an infinite loop, hopping back and forth between Chapter 58 and Chapter 131. I'm only on Chapter 37, ending Park One (Del lado de alla/“From the Other Side”) and beginning Part Two (Del lado de aca/“From This Side”), but I'm interested in seeing where I'm going to end up inevitably suspended. It's all really quite ingenious.

Other competitors for the Trippy WTF literary devices category include chapter 28, which skips from page 162 to page 179, without explanation. As this is the chapter when an important character is found dead, I'm assuming these missing pages have something to do with this. To make things even weirder, in the English translation I have checked out for reference, these pages are included. I haven't read them for fear of “spoiling” something that will later be revealed to me as the book progresses, but still, how strange! Where did these pages come from? Are they still waiting for me somewhere, lurking in the back of the pages I have yet to read? Where on earth did the English translator get them from? What a weird situation. At least it highlights the dramatic contrasts that can be found between reading a book in the original language versus the translation (the other translation problem I have with is the translation of “papas fritas” as “fried potatoes”--wouldn't this be French fries? What do you call “fried potatoes” in France?).

Chapter 34 is also an excellent candidate for one of the weirdest reading experiences of my life. So that you can try it out for yourself, here's an excerpt:

"IN September of 1880, a few months after the demise of my
AND the things she reads, a clumsy novel, in a cheap edition
father, I decided to give up my business activities, transferring
besides, but you wonder how she can get interested in things
them to another house in Jerez whose standing was as solvent
like this. To think that she's spent hours on end reading tasteless
as that of my own; I liquidated all the credits I could, rent out
stuff like this and plenty of other incredible things, Elle and
the properties, transferred my holdings and inventories, and
France Soir, those sad magazines Babs lends her. And moved to
moved to Madrid to take up residence there. My uncle (in truth
Madrid to take up residence there, I can see how after you swal-
my father's first cousin), Don Rafael Bueno de Guzman y Ataide,
low four or five pages you get in the groove and can't stop read-"

(Rabassa 191) If you figured out that you're supposed to read this by skipping every other line, then you're a lot smarter than me (to be fair I was reading it in Spanish, and I kept plunging gamely on with the hope that this was some kind of avant-garde rap and that it would begin to make sense to me eventually. The broken-up words like “swal-” and “read-” were what eventually gave it away). How clever, no? As you go on reading this chapter, you realize that the odd lines are from one of the trashy novels that Magda loves to read, and the even lines are Horacio's interior monologue as he reads the very same lines that you've just read, criticizing the book as he reads it (like with the Madrid sentence in the passage above). How clever, no? I don't know if I've ever come across a better attempt to reproduce the experience of reading, by means of spatial arrangement right there on the page. On the last page the lines from the trashy novel drop off and you're left with Horacio, imagining himself and Magda wandering around the city but never meeting, “two points lost in Paris that go from here to there, from there to here, drawing their picture, putting on a dance for nobody, not even for themselves, an interminable pattern without any meaning.” (197) There you have Part 1 of Rayuela in a nutshell: aimless wanderings, a quest for a missing center, the lack of meaning, the concern with geometry.

This is a good book to be reading following the graduation of college. There's a lot of sitting around and Bolano-esque talking, smoking cigarettes, drinking, wandering through the streets of Paris and the eating of fried eggs and potatoes (I love it when authors inform us of what their characters like to eat; Bolano and Murakami are masters of this). There's a lot in the book about wandering around without any direction. The main narrator so far is Horacio Oliveira, an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his Uruguayan girlfriend, La Maga. He spends a lot of time either walking around Paris with la Maga, hanging out with his group of bohemian friends who call themselves “El Club,” and having weird and random adventures, like in Chapter 23 when he attends a concert by an eccentric modernist pianist. Part 1 ends with a death, Maga's disappearance, and Horacio's Dante-like descent into degradation and sordidness, which ends with him getting deported back to Argentina. We'll see what Part 2 has in store for him.

Horacio is definitely looking for something. As la Maga tells him, “I think I understand you... You're looking for something you don't know. I've been doing the same thing and I don't know what it is either. But they're two different things.” (76) I like the part when Horacio ponders that “this mate might show me where the center is.” (78) There's this the very Borges-esque thread running throughout the novel, the Argentinean preoccupation with the search for an absent center, the desire to come back to an origin, the desire to understand, the desire for meaning. Ironically enough, while searching for these very structured concepts, Horacio also stubbornly rejects “the idea of unity [which] was worrying to him because it seemed so easy to fall into the worst traps.” (79) Much is made of Maga's lack of intellectualism, but as Oliviera observes, while he imposes “the false order that hides chaos, pretending that I was dedicated to a profound existence while all the time it was one that barely dipped it toes into the terrible waters. There are metaphysical rivers, she swims in them ... I describe and define and desire those rivers, but she swims in them. I look for them, find them, observe them from the bridge, but she swims in them. And she doesn't know it.” (95) There's a lot to unpack there, but suffice it to say, it sure does sound pretty. There's also a lot of Buddhist-related meditations on death and connectedness and the importance of the present moment, which surprised me.

There's lots more I could say about this, but I think I'll leave it at that, mainly it's currently the hottest part of the day and it looks like we'll be going swimming after all. Time to return to the present moment.

“My hand pokes around the bookcase... I take down Roberto Arlt... Today fascinates me, but always from the point of view of yesterday (did I say phascinate?), and that's how at my age the past becomes present and the present is a strange and confused future where boys in baggy sweaters and long-haired girls drink their cafes-cremes and pet each other with the slow gracefulness of cats or plants.
We must fight against this.
We must establish ourselves in the present once more.” (94)

Aira's ghosties

Little kids used to scare me. Though maybe "intimidate" is a better word. Kids are so emotional, you know? These little events upset us so much and remain deeply ingrained in our memories and psyches as moments of momentous injustice that we never, ever forget. I remember crying as a 5-year-old when a girl wouldn't share her potato chips with me (we're friends now on a social networking site, another testament to the weirdness that is the Internet). I guess I really, really wanted those potato chips (it was also the first day of kindergarten, so I was probably already pretty emotionally drained). There are so many moments at my job when I'm dealing with a kid who is just incredibly upset by something that seems so trivial to an adult (someone cutting ahead of you in a line is a big one).

The kids themselves in this novel aren't as scary as the situation they're in. Childhood was an important theme in Aira's How I Became a Nun (perhaps more important than I realized when I first read it) and plays a similarly prominent role in the most recent of his works that I've read,Ghosts. Ghosts is my favorite of the three Aira novles I've read, maybe because it's the one written in the most realistic tone. The focus of the novel is on a Chilean immigrant family living in an apartment building under construction. The father is the night watchmen. A lot of references are made to his heavy drinking, but all in all, this feels like a happy family. The children run up and down the stairs, play in the empty swimming pool, but an uneasy, ominous feeling hangs over everything.

And then there are the ghosts. Aira's treatment of the ghosts is what makes this novella worth reading. It's an understatement to say that I've never read anything quite like it before. They first appear sitting on the sharp metallic edge of the giant satellite dish, "on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the mdday sun; no one saw them, of course." Here is the first full descriptive passages of the titular ghosts, from page 12:

The naked men shouted louder and louder as if competing with each other. They were dirty like builders, and had the same kind of bodies: rather stocky, solid, with small feet, and rough hands. Their toes were spread widely, like wild men's toes. They were behaving like badly brought-up children. But they were adults. A builder who happenned to be passing by with a bucketful of rubble on the way to the skip stretched out his free hand and, without stopping, grasped the penis of one of the naked men and kept walking. The member stretched out to a length of two yards, and then three, five, ten, all the way to the sidewalk. When he let it go, it slapped back into place with a noise whose weird harmonics went on echoing off the unplastered concrete walls... The two ghosts laughed more loudly and frenetically than ever.

Yeah.

It feels significant that the rich folks that are being given a tour of their future apartment can't see the ghosts, but the workers can. Aira never explains where the ghosts come from, how the workers first saw them, or how long it took for them to get used to naked men floating around the air and through walls. In a way, this is probably the best way to handle the ghosts. It's like an extreme version of Kafka or Garcia Marquez, where we come to accept the fantastical elements of a story because they're written in such a matter-of-fact, realistic way. In the end, we accept the ghosts because the characters accept them in such an unquestioning, logical fashion. For instance, the next passage in which the ghosts appear (after the member-pulling) concerns the father's innovative wine-cooling system: "It consisted of resolutely approaching a ghost and inserting a bottle into his thorax, where it remained, supernaturally balanced. When he went back for it, say two hours later, it was cold." (29) How practical!

The sense of impending doom (or "climate of malevolence") (67) that hangs like a cloud over the children throughout the novel comes not so much from the ghosts (who come off more like a "flying puppet show" than a genuine menance or threat), but from how dangerous it is to have the children roaming around unsupervised in a roofless building with exposed electrical wiring. During a standard trip to the supermarket, the mother is described as "that anomaly, not nearly as rare as is often supposed: a mother immune to the terrifying fantasy of losing her children in a crowd." (23) Is this attitude is an effect of becoming numb to the presence of the ghosts? Needless to say, we're being set up: by the novel's end, one of these kids is done for.

In David Lodge's essay "The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads?" from his book The Practice of Writing (I've been on a huge David Lodge kick lately and have several of his lit theory books lying around the house for Corey to trip over and curse), he writes about how fabulation in works such as The Satanic Verses "aims to entertain us with the humorous extravagance and inventiveness of its story while offering this as a kind of metaphor... for the extreme contrasts and conflicts of modern experience." (7) This could be applied very aptly to Aira, especially since humor plays such an important role in his fiction. My favorite character in Ghosts is Abel Reyes, the night watchman's nephew, who embarks upon a Kafkaesque grocery shopping quest to buy lunch for the workmen. I love how he obstinately refuses to use a shopping basket and with arms full of bread and meat picks up the Coca Cola bottles with the index finger and thumb of each hand, "which was all he had free." (20) I'm tempted to type up the entire passage that describes him: he is described as looking eleven years old despite being fifteen, "thin, ugly, awkward." Much is made of his long gross hair that makes him look like a girl: "Being young, foreign and therefore naive, he didn't realize that the Argentineans with long hair belonged to the lowest social stratum, and were precisely those who had condemned themselves to never escape from it... In Chile, [with hair that long] he would have been interviewed on television, or, more likely, thrown into prison." (18) It's funny, but "thrown into prison" catches us off guard slightly, as we ponder how true this might be.

Even though Abdul Reyes sadly disappears from the pages of Ghosts following his shopping expedition, I think his appearence sets up the subplot of Patri, the teenage daughter, whose musings and interactions with the ghosts comes to dominate the second half of the book. The other characters are consistently reminding Patri that she is reaching a "marriageable" age and worrying aloud about her lack of a social life, neither of which seem to interest her much. When her choice of men are people like Abdul Reyes, it's unsurprising that Patri's interest is piqued by the "virility" of the ghosts, who invite her to a party. The results of said party are not spoiler-friendly, and I leave it up to you, dear reader, to discover for yourself. I will say that Patri's interactions with the ghosts definitely represents a sort of crossing-over journey for her, from childhood to womanhood.

That's why I feel like childhood is one of the more important themes of the book. The children are made to seem just as freaky and otherwordly as the ghosts in this novel: "compared to an adult, they were always tiny. They were human in every way, but on another scale. And that alone could render them unrecognizable, or give the impression that they had been produced by the baffling distortions of a dream." (51) For Patri, the ghosts also appear to her "as the opposite of obscenity, as a kind of innocence." (54) I won't attempt to unpack the long interlude about Australian aborigenes and Polynesian interactions with sleep, dreams and rite of passage that takes up a good 10-15 pages in the middle of the book, but anyway, it all feels connected in an important, obscure way (while simultaneously feeling quite random and disorienting).

So what are we left with in the end? Are the ghosts an appropriate metaphor for the impossibility of coping with the modern experience? Are the ghosts spirits of laborers or immigrants who died working on the building, or in one of Argentina's military regimes? The last sentence of the novel is "Man and ghost stared at each other," (139) and apart from Patri, it could be the first time that any of the characters really "sees" the ghosts (and, more significantly, the ghosts see the living). There are quite a number of scenes concerned with "seeing" throughout the novel, such as when the characters turn off the lights during the New Year's Eve party in order to see the stars, or on the next to last sentence of the book, when one of the ghosts hands over a pair of glasses.

Lodge writes that one of the prominent marks of contemporary writing is a pronounced concern with communication, as opposed to self-expression (as with the romantic writers) or with innovation and creation of symbols (as with the modernists). Maybe this concern with communication is the result of genuine communication becoming an illusion; maybe it's the result of the saturation of communications: internet, phones, twitter, blogging, Skype, faxes, e-mail... on and on and on. We live in a hyper-communicative age. I like to think that, like anything, this is a power that can be used for good just as easily as it can be used for evil. For better or worse, it's the world we live in.

We'll just have to see, I guess.

mad clubbing

This week has been full of

• Seemingly endless shopping for supplies at the Dollar Tree and Fred Meyer: measuring spoons, alka seltzer, baking soda, white vinegar, corn starch, half-and-half, plastic zip lock bags...


• Playing in the fountain in downtown Hillsboro and getting head-to-toe soaking wet, much to the delight of the kids


• Breaking up a fight started by this foster home kid who'd entered this obstinate Beserker rage that reminded me of the Bloodwrath of the badgers from Salamandastron in the Redwall novels.


• Life-saving yoga classes in the evening on Alberta street.


• Dodging and praying not to run into Max ticket officers. It's like clockwork: I don't buy one, I get checked, I buy one, I'm never checked. I'm just waiting for Laura to get back from Montana so she can help me arrange having one of her college student housemates buy me one for 1/2 the price.


• Dealing with the wrath of the kitchen lady (NEVER borrow a kitchen lady's garbage can, and then forget to return it.)


• Daily 6AM wake-ups.


• Missing Corey, in Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker until Thursday.
  
• Missing talking to my sister about stupid stuff.


• Getting tons of e-mails now from Kiva. The internship has officially begun. It's both exciting and a little scary at the same time. Another new chapter and crazy adventure is coming up here pretty soon...


• Half-heartedly applying for part-time jobs, even though I really really enjoy my current schedule of 30-35 hours per week. I have yet to work the "standard" 40-hour a week job; those hours sound so crazy and soul-sucking to me...


• Learning to play "Once Upon a Dream" from Disney's Sleeping Beauty movie on the keyboards, as well as playing the babyfied version of Moonlight Sonata over and over and over and over again.


• Getting helped out by A., probably the Club's biggest problem child, while making ice cream (he helped bring ice cubes from the kitchen). VICTORY! Small steps! Small steps!


• Never-ending program planning and refining. Animal Camp is next week for 10-12 year olds and it's been a nightmare to plan for, especially after the two field trip places I had lined up canceled on me. Groan...

I've also been reading Arlt's The Seven Madmen, the 1984 edition translated by Naomi Lindstrom. (Arlt is really ripe for a rippingly good, modern-day translation, in the style of "The Savage Detectives" or Elizabeth Grossman's "Don Quixote.") I've only read Part I, but some stuff has really stood out for me. In Piglia's Respiracion artificial, one of his characters has a long rant about how Arlt is a bad writer, but how that's ok (it goes much more in depth than that). But yeah, that was definitely my first impression of this novel: I could never have gotten away with using some of these similes in the few creative writing classes I took. Take this gem of a sentence: "He felt each spasm of grief hopping like an owl from branch to branch in his misery." (25) How visual is that? Or how about this one: "Like a horse with its guts torn out by a bull, mucking around in its own viscera, every step he took drained his lungs of their lifeblood." (17) O dear.

Strangely enough, the book this has reminded me the most of is Fight Club. The main character, Erdosain, is fired from his dead-end job as a bill collector for embezzling six hundred pesos and seven centavos on the same day that his wife leaves him for a creepy dude called El Capitan. In order to get the money he needs to avoid jail, as well as refind structure and sense to his life, he turns to a strange figure called the Astrologer, who is this book's Tyler Durden mastermind character. The Astrologer has this ridiculously convuluted plan that is never clear: we're not sure if it involves the Ku Klux Klan or Lenin-loving Marxists. In the words of the book cover summary, his plan is "a terrorist conspiracy to help the unemployed that will lure workers to mountain stronghold factories and enslave them. For start-up capital, a chain of bordellos is proposed. To finance these, the murder of Erdosain's wife's rich cousin is planned." Believe me, it's never made as clear as all that.

The main character, Erdosain, reminds me of a hero from a novel by Camus or Satre, bringing way back to memories of middle and high school days of me lying on my stomach on my bed reading dusty, battered books pulled out of my parents' shelves, based on how interesting the cover art looked to me, as well as the novel's fame (Nausea, the Stranger). On page 6, Erdosain is already asking of himself, "What am I doing with my life? What kind of soul do I have? What have I made of my life?" (6-7, 12) That ought to be the first indication that this novel isn't going to be your regular, run-of-the-mill crime caper or pulp fiction that Arlt supposedly adored.

Anyway, in the one of his ponderings, Erdosain makes an interesting point:

"I'm nothing in everyone's eyes. But still, if tomorrow I throw a bomb or murder Barsut, [his wife's rich cousin] suddenly I'm everything, the man who exists, the man for whom generations of criminologists have prepared punishments, jails, and theories... That's really weird! And yet, only crime can affirm my existence, just as evil is all that affirms the presence of man on earth.. Really, this is all so weird. Still, despite everything, there is darkness and mankind's soul is sad. Infinitely sad. But that can't be how life is. If tomorow I figured out why that can't be how life is, I'd pinch myself and disinflate like a balloon spewing out all these lies I'm filled with." (81)

Depressingly enough, this reminded me of the whole Michael Jackson debacle. I can't believe how swiftly news of the frontlines of Iran has been banished from headlines to make room for story after story of a dead entertainer (the L.A. Times receives a particularly big FAIL in this regard--I mean, I know it's L.A., but come on! Seriously?). Also, somewhat depressingly, this passage made me think of some kids where I work. It's tough dealing with troubled individuals from what are defnitely some very messed-up home lives, because so much of your time and energy and attention and focus goes into trying to prevent these kids from having one of their explosive temper tantrums or freakouts (or calming them down when they do). This summer, it feels like there's just been an explosion of eccentric individuals (all worthy of their own novel) at the workplace. Isn't it weird how, in the end, these are the kids who seem to "exist" the most strongly for me, the ones who take up my daytime time and attention to the point where they've even started making appearences in my dreams?

The other thing the novel touches upon that I found interesting (which I won't write about too much now because it's nearing 10:30 and I'm exhausted and need to get to bed) is the characters' search for truth and (in Erdosain's own words) that wonderful phrase, "the meaning of life." Ha! Let me end this with a quote from the Astrologer:

"In the old days we could have taken refuge in a monastery or traveled to unknown and marvelous lands. But today you can eat a morning sherbet in Patagonia and be eating bananas in Brazil in the afternoon. [This book was published in 1929, mind you.] What are we supposed to do? I read a good deal, and believe me, in every book from Europe now I find that same undercurrent of pain and bitterness you describe in your own life." (87)

Never Stop Reading: I Must Give So I Can Live

"We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain."

It feels good to end the month on a high note! Yesterday Laura and I got dirty from digging her garden, walked down Alberta St., drank a lot of coffee, had Happy Hour at the Tin Shed, and wandered into a music instrument store. Laura has her heart set on getting an oud but alas, her quest has been a bit hard-going. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get a keyboard, because it's a) cheaper than a banjo and b) I already know how to play it, you know? Sometimes, laziness does play the winning card.

I'm pretty excited about June and the summer in Portland. The Boys & Girls Club is closed for the next two weeks for summer maintenance and to get ready for summer programming, so that's been a nice little break, albeit a bit boring (there's only so much dusting one can do without getting bored). Right now it's so unbelievably hot in the house I'm not sure how much more of this getting-caught-up on silly computer stuff I can take, but I'm sitting in front of the open window where there's a nice breeze so I'm gonna give it my best shot.


How I Became A Nun by Cesar Aira

This is the weirdest book I've ever read in my life. I can definitely see why the Bolaño rave is on the front cover. The back cover summarizes the book as "a modern day 'Through the Looking Glass,' that begins in cyanide poisoning and ends in strawberry ice cream." That's probably about as good as a summary you're going to get.

It's also important to mention that although the main character has the same name as the author, it's never clear whether the narrator is male or female (she appears as a female more often than not). The NY Times book review focuses on this gender ambiguity quite a bit, viewing it as the key unspoken part of the novel: namely, more than anything else, this book is about a girl trapped in a boy's body. I don't know if this interpretation is what Aira intended, but it definitely makes for an interesting reading.

I liked the first chapter, involving said cyanide poisoning. The last chapter, involving a kidnapping, is quite Fargo-esque. The main word I would use the describe this book is "surreal." Or maybe "dream-like." What's up the section involving the main character's friendship with a boy who likes to play dress up with a plastic nose and his grandmother's teeth? What to make of the character's inability to "read" when he/she rejoins kindergarten, after his/her extended hospital stay? What does the title refer to? (The NY Times book review thinks it's a reference to Spanish picaresque novels.) What to make of this book, period? Damn, I've never read anything quite like it, and it's doubtful that you have either. It's pretty damn cool to read contemporary fiction like this.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die


A Mercy by Toni Morrison

I OWN I am shock'd at the purchase of slaves,
And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;
What I hear of their hardships, their tortures, and groans,
Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
(William Cowper, Pity for Poor Africans)

How could we do without sugar and rum? I mean, we like sugar and rum, right? We like our little comforts. They make our lives easier. We don't need them on the level as we do, say, shelter and food and warmth, but they sure do make our lives a lot better and a lot more comfortable. And when it's our own ease and comfort that's at stake, it gets very, very trick when we start considering where that comfort comes from, and at what cost.

This is just one of the questions asked by this very powerful, well-written book. Toni Morrison kind of reminds me of Tori Amos, in the sense that they can both pump out these absoultely brilliant masterpieces with an ease that would be monumental and earth-shattering for any other author. This book reads as a very effective companion/prequel to "Beloved." There's a lot to like here: the Faulknerian narrative, the poetic language, the history of early European settlement and the beginnings of slavery on U.S. soil, some Bruce Springsteen-worthy imagery of a man's dream house rising on a hill above the Virginia fog, a New World-esque motif of a girl struggling to fit into and get used to her shoes. Themes dealt with include debt, freedom, family, and ultimately how “to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.”

This book made me think a lot about Power and how I use Power in my everday life. There's this essay by George Orwell called "Such, Such Were the Joys," in which he describes how his experiences at prep school were his earliest experiences of fascism. Blind Justice being dealt out arbitrarily, for no rhyme or reason that you can see. Sometimes I feel like I'm teaching kids about Facism at my job. "Line up, it's time to go to meeting!" "But why?" they ask. "Why can't I just run around screaming? Why can't I just throw things on the floor? I don't like him, why do I have to stand next to him? Why? Why? Why?" It all must seem very silly, these exercises in How To Be A Socialized Polite Human Being I'm responsible for implementing, day in and day out. I think in the end, as Tori Amos sings on her new album, "I must give so I can live." A good mantra. You get what you give. You can use power (over yourself and over others) wisely, for good rather than for evil. You can be aware of it and the consequences of abusing power. It can make you appreciate, above all else, your Freedom, all the more so if you're a young woman.

Anyway, in the end I think the less you know about this book, the more you'll enjoy it, because that's one of the things I really appreciated: having no idea where the story was going and being constantly thrilled and awed by the skillful writing and plot development. Damn Toni, you write like a motherfucker, and you put us all to shame. It's the kind of book you put down and stare into space for a while after turning the last page. Highly recommended.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die


By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño

A very memorable, powerful book that asks the very difficult but important question: what is the relevance (if any) of literature to Real Life, especially when said Real Life involves political turmoil? (Specifically a military coup when people are being tortured and killed in basements while literary salon-like parties of the intellectual elite are taking place upstairs.) Is it brave and wise to read Thucycides and Plato when a democratically elected president is being overthrown, or just hopelessly stupid and out-of-touch? With this novella, narrated by a Jesuit priest who gives classes in the history and aesthetics of Marxism to Pinochet after the coup, I can see why Bolaño liked "How I Became A Nun" after reading this book. Oh, Bolaño. You make my life so much better. More than anything else, Bolaño has shown me that truly great literature has a strong connection to the relevant, to what is going on the world.

Rating: Read This Book, Bolaño Fans



Last Evenings on Earth by Bolaño

Amazing. Simply amazing. A must-read. Bolaño makes me feel happy to be alive, and how can a book be anything other than amazing if it makes you feel that way? Bolaño's characters fuck, drink, swear, travel, smoke, live in exile, feel homeless and above all else readreadread and writewritewrite. Standout stories include the title one (a contemporary interpretation of Borges' "El sur" ), "Mauricio ('The Eye') Silva" (which reminded me of "The Ministry of Special Cases," in the way it serves as a eulogy for the victims of the "disappearences" in Chile and Argentina), "Enrique Martin" (scary and disturbing, and more than a little Phillip K. Dick-esque), "Anne Moore's Life" (one of the few Bolaño pieces where the main character is female), "Vagabond in France and Belgium" (I liked the ending: "But she doesn't hang up.") and "Dentist," which contains the closest manifesto of Bolaño-esque fiction that he has perhaps ever written, as well as the following extraordinary sentence: "We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain." Oh, it just makes me want to sigh happily and hug myself with blissful, satisfied, sated contentment.

(The NY Times book review of this book is particulary well-written and makes for a good introduction if you've never read any Bolaño before.)

Rating: Read This Before You Die, If You Know What's Good For You


Nazi Literature in the Americas by Bolaño

The kind of novel Borges would have written, had he written a novel. Basically, this novel is an encyclopedia of fictional fascist right-wing writers; mostly from Argentina, some from the U.S., Germany, and Chile. Apparently Bolano told an interviewer, "(Its) focus is on the world of the ultra right, but much of the time, in reality, I'm talking about the left.... When I'm talking about Nazi writers in the Americas, in reality I'm talking about the world, sometimes heroic but much more often despicable, of literature in general." A very interesting take. Overall, the book's "gimmick" got a little much for me after 150+ pages. All of author's names started to blur together in my mind. I was slightly confused when I realized that the last chapter is basically the same story as "Distant Star;" I'd be interested in knowing which one he wrote first (I assume this one, as it's much less fleshed out and detailed as DS). I'd recommend this only to Bolaño fans because I can see how it might be tough going for someone who isn't used or into this kind of intensely referential writing (think of the footnotes in "House of Leaves" times 190 pages). The NY Times has another really good, well-written review for both the Bolaño fan and novice; it makes the interesting point that had the Nazis won World War II, this book could very well be true, you know? History is all about the point of view; in the case of this novel, it's from the loser's, which creates poetic irony but also makes it a little disturbing when you consider how it could all so easily be true.

Rating: Read This Book, Bolaño Fans and Followers of Borges


First Stop in the New World by David Lida

I read this book in a day. I'm very impressed with myself (as well as slightly horrified by how much time I spend per day commuting). I heard of this book when Corey and I met the author on the plane back from New Orleans; he was very nice and I am very pleased to say that I enjoyed this book very much! It's the kind of book I wouldn't mind writing myself someday: a nice balance of tone, a journalism and literary hybrid. Man, it sure did make me miss Mexico... those sizzling street tacos, mmmm. This book is about as informative and in-the-know as you're gonna get about the D.F. Lida interviews politicians, the richest inhabitants of the city, glue-sniffing street kids, crack-smoking cab drivers, newspaper vendors, artists and more.

I liked how he made use of Octavio Paz's "The Labyrinth of Solitude" when discussing Mexican culture and Mexican behavior. The use of "masks", both personal and cultural, is pretty central in Paz's essay, and it makes me think of what masks I use in my life. In terms of my cultural/racial heritage, I'm mostly British and Portuguese, with some Irish and German thrown in there. I'm basically a child of Empire. I was inventing this theory with Corey on the Max about how maybe historical and cultural baggage can have a subconscious effect on your own self-perception. Maybe that's why Searching and Self-Absorption and Who-Am-I can be understood as Stuff White People Like: we're all carrying around this weighty historical guilt from facilitating or implementing imperialism and colonialism. This is a really badly articulated argument that was formed when I'd had a few beers, so apologies for that. Anyway, all this reminiscing about Mexico makes me all the more pscyhed to see Luis Alberto Urrea at Powell's books on June 3rd. (The Devil's Highway is a really powerful, great work of investigative journalism.)

Rating: Definitely Read This If You're Interested in Mexico City/Mexico

April Books

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

A very well-written, readable and well-argued book. McKibben basically argues that we need to redefine our understanding of classic economics: namely that more doesn't always necessarily equal better, not just for sustainable reasons (we're running out of resources on our planet) but for personal reasons (more stuff, bigger businesses and expanding economies aren't making us happier). It's an interesting argument and he follows through with it pretty well with practical suggestions on how we can refocus our energies on building more local economies and communities. I really enjoyed McKibben's discussion of behavioral economics and the science of happiness, two topics I find really interesting and know very little about. There are a few moments that are a little too "oh god, you are such an environmentalist from Vermont," like when he suggests giving bus drivers your personal mix CDs to slap on the stereo. Also, McKibeen seems to be writing for an audience that he automatically assumes is anti neoliberal and free trade, so if you're not, that might be a problem for you. (Disclaimer: it wasn't for me, I'm just trying to be fair and balanced here.) However, overall McKibben does quite a good job of making practical suggestions for how to make the world a better place and how to be more hopeful in general, which is a nice change from the more general "oh-god-we're-all-doomed" feeling of recent months.

The one part of the book that I keep summarizing and quoting to all of my co-workers and friends is the section where McKibben talks about the science of happiness. He asks the very interesting question of what was the time in our lives when most of us would say that we were happiest. For most people, they would say volunteering, with family, with friends, etc.... being around others. Being *out* of yourself and your chatty little head, and instead feeling like you're a part of something bigger than yourself. That really hit the nail on the head for me, and put into words something I'd been struggling to articulate to myself for a while now: what has brought me some of the highest levels of joy in my life was when I felt like I was "out of myself," part of something larger, whether in the hugeness of nature or within a community of people (like Los Embajadores in Tijuana), not as this self-internalizing super efficient/proficient utility machine.

Whether my enjoyment of finally having this particular feeling put into words actually leads to me doing or deciding something concrete remains to be seen. I think of my advisor's advice to me of why not to go to graduate school, at least not for literature, and it really rings more and more true for me by the day. He was like "travel! Get out in the world! Work with kids!" This summer, I'm gonna garden.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die



Keep the Aspidistra Flying (George Orwell)

An enjoyable if not earth shattering read. Orwell is the master of succinct, perfect sentences. Along with watching "Revolutionary Road," this book definitely helped put me in a weird mindset about the whole settling down into a comfortable career and lifestyle deal, while thinking that you're this person who's "better" than everyone else around you. The happy ending feels a little forced; if Orwell had been truer to the tone of earlier parts of the book, the characters' fate would have been a lot darker. Orwell said in a letter that when he wrote it, "I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100," which explains a lot. All in all, a nice fictional companion to "Down and Out in Paris and London."

Rating: Read This If You're An Orwell Fan


El Juguete Rabioso / The Mad Toy (Roberto Arlt)

Another book about a character whose life is really affected by money (namely his lack of it). I would have really dug this book in high school, a lot, and probably would have had a little bit of a crush on Silvio, the main character.

The Mad Toy took me a long time to get through, despite its 142 pages. I don't really know why. I don't exactly know what to make of this book. I'm not sure what the title refers to, for one. I guess "the mad toy" is Silvio himself, and the title refers to the way in which he often finds himself inevitably being used as "a toy" by people in power and by the mentors he consistently keeps seeking (and failing) to find. The final chapter (ominously titled "Judas Iscariot"), in which Silvio deliberately betrays a mentor/friend, can be understood as Silvio's attempt to subvert this feeling of always feeling like a plaything to others whims, and instead claim some agency of his own (at the stake of his friend, which is troublesome).

The first chapter is about Silvio as a young boy and his adventures in inventing amateur weapons of war and his life of crime as a book thief, smuggling encyclopedias and Baudelaire out of the school library. I love the sentence that he uses to introduce an anecdote about one of his inventions, copying the language of the pirate and Dumas paperbacks he loves. "A resounding adventure was that of my cannon, and happy am I to recall it." I like to repeat this phrase quietly to myself. It adds so much, narrating the events in our lives with a deliberate aesthetic style!

Needless to say, it says a lot about Silvio that his first career is as a book thief. He goes on to try working as a bookstore assistant, an apprentice airplane mechanic for the military, and a paper salesman, without finding much satisfaction. However, what seems to keep him going is his ability to aesthetically narrate his life and his surroundings, infusing it with what he experiences as an inexplicable joy:

I'm not crazy, one thing is certain, though... I know that life will always be extraordinarily beautiful for me. I don't know whether other people will experience the force of life as I do, but inside me there is joy, a full, unconscious kind of joy. Everything surprises me. Sometimes I have the feeling that it's just an hour since I arrived on earth, and everything is flaming new, fresh, beautiful. (150)

Silvio's goals by the end of the book are to "see glaciers and mountains and clouds." That sounds pretty good to me. The last sentence of the book is "I tripped over a chair, and kept going." It reminded me a lot of the last sentence of Catch-22. You jump out of the way of the whore's knife, life tangles you up and catches you off guard, but you gotta keep going.

Silvio's final mentor figure is the policeman who receives his confession/ratting out his friend, but doesn't arrest him. The wisdom he imparts to Silvio is "we obey a brutal law that's inside us. That's it. We obey the law of the jungle." A very true thing it is, human brutality. And yet it's not the only true thing. We feel as human beings, profoundly and deeply. What is it that drives some people to not just see life as a drudgery and a chore, life as 9-5, as a series of steps: college, job, marriage, children, retirement death? What is it that drives some people to make the conscious choice to love life, to see it as sweet?

I'd like to keep joy inside me. I'd like to aesthetically narrate my life, my day-to-day.

Love, poetry, gratitude toward life, toward books, and toward the world would send an electrical charge through the blue sinews of my soul.
It wasn't me, but the god inside me, a god fashioned from pieces of mountain, forest, sky and memory. (123)

Rating: Read This Before You Die



When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chödrön

A self-help book written by a Buddhist Canadian nun. I first heard of this book when my yoga teacher read aloud a passage at the end of one class that really connected to me. I recognized a lot of her advice from stuff my counselor gave me to read way back in junior year. She talks a lot about loving compassion, the importance of breathing in and out, exercising non-judgment. It's not just all theoretical, there's a lot of practical advice in her. All in all, a very wise book by a very wise lady. Even if you're not in a time of your life where things are falling apart, there's definitely some stuff in here that you could use.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die

In April I also read Phillip K. Dick's Flow My Tears the Policeman Said and Ubik, both good reads if you're a Dick fan (hee), but not necessarily vital. I also read Faulkner's The Wild Palms, which hopefully I'll be able to devote an entire post to this weekend. And that was my April.

Here an Intellectual, There an Intellectual, Where to Put the Intellectual?

The concern of the intellectual is by definition the conscience. An intellectual who fails to understand what is happening in his time and in his country is a walking contradiction, and those who understand but do nothing will have a place reserved in the anthology of tears but not in the living history of their land.--Rodolfo Walsh, Seminario CGT, May 1st 1968

I've been reading a biography of Rodolfo Walsh (True Crimes: Rodolfo Walsh and the Role of the Intellectual in Latin American Politics by Michael McCaughan, Latin American Bureau 2000) which is also an anthology of his fiction and journalism translated into English. Not only has it been an interesting read, but it also has some eerily appropriate parallel themes with my current ponderings. Walsh was an Argentine writer and journalist, born of Irish ancestry and raised in a Catholic boarding school, wrote a In Cold Blood-like non-fiction work called Operacion Masacre, went to Cuba shortly after the Castro revolution in order to work in the news industry there and weirdly enough ended up intercepting a code from the CIA that gave away the location for the Bay of Pigs invasion, abandoned fiction to devote himself full-time to journalism and underground resistance work in the 70's once the political situation in Argentina really went down the drain, and was shot and killed in a shoot-out by the military in the middle of the street (his body was never recovered). He is counted as one of Argentina's 30,000 “disappeared” of that period. Isn't that weird, how you can sum someone's life up like that, in a couple of greatest-hits sentences? (I inevitably wonder what my own sentences will consist of...)

I haven't finished the book yet (I'm at the part where he gets really intensely involved in underground resistance), but there have definitely been some moments in the book that have given me pause and thus merit some reflection here. The short stories are excellent, particularly "Footnote" and "Esa mujer" (check them out). There's a lot of discussion in the book (as indicated by the subtitle) about Walsh's struggle with the role of the intellectual in society, which I found personally quite relevant... I feel uncomfortable about calling myself an “intellectual,” but I definitely read a lot, and like thinking about things that probably a lot of people would consider quite silly, such as “what is the role of the intellectual in society?” (After Barry-O's election and Georgie's reign, this question has been given a bit more attention.) I went to an expensive college, my parents are well-educated. I like reading fiction, writing fiction (goes without saying I need to do this one more), writing and talking about fiction. Yeah... I am pretty much a bourgeois intellectual.

I guess I struggle a lot with how relevant all of this is (the reading and writing and talking about fiction). I like doing a lot of other stuff to, outside of this—I like working with people, I like being with people, I like doing things that feel like they make more of a difference in a day-to-day sense. My job isn't super prestigious or super high paying or anything like that, but someone's got to hang out with these kids and give them something positive in their lives, you know? I dunno, I'll just say that I find it relevant and then leave it at that. My struggle (which I was reminded of again and again in this book) is finding a balance between these two things: the whole isolated hermetic ivory tower writer and intellectual tradition versus the nitty-gritty, down and dirty, involved in the world role. Is there a way to combine the two? Does it really come down to choosing one or the other? Is the role of books in my life destined to be restricted to a hobby, a sideline entertainment, or will it become a career? (The latter's up to me to decide, I guess.) Interestingly enough, in some of the interviews with family members and friends, a lot of them express frustration about Walsh's choice of journalism over politics... there's a certain attitude in their words of "oh, he could have been one of the greatest Argentinean fiction writers, he had so much potential, but then he went ahead and got involved in politics and justice." I don't think there's really a right or wrong choice; it's just a matter of the type of person you are... some of us are content, others of us are a little more scattered and need to explore different roles and careers in order to find that kind of satisfied fulfillment...

I folded over the upper-right corner on the page where Walsh is having a conversation with another young aspiring author, in his early 20's (this really hits home in terms of the theme of this blog):

“These are different times, Nicolas, and this is a time for a bigger undertaking. When you're trying to change important things, then you realize that a short story, a novel, aren't worth it and won't satisfy you. Beautiful bourgeois art! They taught us that it was the supreme spiritual value. But when you have people who gave their lives, and continue to, literature is no longer your loyal and sweet lover—it's a cheap whore. There are times when ... every spectator is a coward or a traitor. This might be a pain for the more intimate questions of the soul but that's the time we're living in.” (218)

You see this same question in a lot of Roberto Bolaño works. I just read La estrella distante (Distant Star), a 140-page novella that makes for a quick and thought-provoking one-day read. This book talks more about writers and poets than anything else, specifically one poet, Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, who gets involved with the Pinochet Regine by writing state-approved poetry in the sky. If you like Bolaño, you should definitely read this work. I never realized how influenced by Borges he was, either. I'm starting to see this as a common denominator in a lot of the stuff I've been reading or re-reading lately (Lolita, The Island of the Day Before). I don't want to give too much away about the book (part of its impact is being shocked by its unexpected development), but the novel deals with the same question discussed in the Walsh biography: what is the relationship between literature and real events? Is turning to literature when unimaginably violent events are taking place in your immediate world brave or just blind and stupid? The insightful New York Times book review of Bolaño's The Savage Detectives makes an important point:

What can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella "By Night in Chile," that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it's a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolaño's genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?

Yeah... I'm just trying to figure stuff out, I guess. I am in a certain position of power and privilege, in the sense that I have choices of what to do with my life. And just like in Spiderman, "with great power comes great responsibility." So I am trying to figure what I want to do with my brain, and how I can find something to do with my brain that feels both worthwhile and valuable. So it goes.



Maybe getting glasses is the common denominator behind figuring everything out.

More Books Read In Ecuador

Here are some more reviews of books I read in Ecuador.


Lies My Teacher Told Me (James W. Loewen)

This book seemed okay to me at the time when I read it, and then exceedingly less interesting after I read ¨A People´s History of the U.S.¨ The information in both books is basically the same! At least this book employed a copious amount of footnotes, making his claim of a plague that killed off the majority of the Indians before the Spanish got there decidedly less dubious. My eighth-grade self would have probably really liked it.

Rating: Don´t Bother



Intelligence in Nature
A very hippy-dippy book, donated to the house by one of the beloved tour members, who herself was somewhat hippy-dippy but also very cool (throughout the tour I kept thinking ¨wow, I want to be just like you when I grow up!¨, minus the Dead Head phase, I guess). Throughout this book I kept wishing that it had been written by a scientist instead of an anthropologist. Anthropology´s fine and dandy, it´s just that every time the author self-righteously asked one of his interviewees whether they thought it was moral to do experiments on butterflies and slime mold (!), the inner hippie-dippy hater in me cringed. However, it was an interesting enough book, very readable, an anthropologist´s attempt to answer the question ¨is there intelligence in nature?¨ which inevitably leads to all sorts of other questions, like ¨what is knowledge?¨ which I liked a lot, because it reminded me a lot of (WHAM!) my thesis.

There was one quote in the book that I liked enough to write down, in the last chapter, which was about nature´s constant tendency to transform itself: Now other species seem more human to me, and humans seem more natural. Recognizing that the capacity to know exists outside humanity leads to a richer, more adventurous, and more comfortable life. Instead of trampling blindly all over the planet, we see that life´s prodigious powers are housed in all its denizens.¨ I like the idea of the necessity for constant change. I guess I fear growing stagnant, stale, crusty and moldy over the edges. It´s been a long time since I´ve had a routine. Never mind, I guess going to classes is a routine of sorts. It´s really kind of ridiculous how thrown out-there you are into the world after college. Another adventure!

Rating: Maybe Read This, If It Seems Like Your Thing


The Prophet
Definitely one of my favorite books now. I´d started but never finished it a dozen times before, but on a quiet day that I meant to be deliberately meditative and introspective, this was the perfect book to read. I can´t really describe it… the closest fiction author I was reminded of was Calvino, minus the po-mo stylistics. Anyway, you should just own a copy of this book in your house, so that way, one day when you´re in the right mood (preferably after doing yoga and listening in full to Tori Amos´ Under the Pink, you can read it.

Rating: Read This Before You Die



A People´s History of the United States
Again, another book that took me all summer to read. Even now I´m still not sure if I technically read it ¨all,¨ since the majority of it was consumed at bus stops, with me flipping around to different sections, depending on what I felt like reading about at the time. There might be a part in there about early revolutionary America I never got around to. But yeah, I knew this was a famous, best-selling book, so I was surprised at the strong Socialist Rhetoric. I thought America hated socialists! Anyway, one thing I found completely, emphatically unforgivable about this book was the fact that HE DOESN´T USE FOOTNOTES. HOW CAN YOU CALL YOURSELF A PROPER HISTORIAN AND NOT USE FOOTNOTES? THE MIND BOOGLES. End caps lock. The lack of footnotes somewhat ruined this book for me, in a sense, because it meant that anything he said, I automatically questioned myself, ¨where´s the source for this? Is he just pulling this out of his butt?¨

Anyway, just so you know, the most interesting chapters of this book deal with the labor and union strikes of the early 20th century. Maybe I´m just biased, because that´s a period of history I know very little about (Corey said he preferred the Civil War and Reconstruction bits, which are good too, if a bit skimpy, perhaps unavoidable in a book this large). Also, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the chapters about Reagan and Clinton, again, another period of history I know very little about, even though Clinton was the president throughout my childhood. I was too young and out of it to care about politics, though, the most memorable things I remember thinking about the Clinton presidency is reading in the Scholastic newsletter in first grade that Clinton played the saxophone and thinking that was very exciting.

Rating: Read The Parts of This Book That Seem Interesting To You Personally


Collected Fictions (Borges)
This book is awesome, Borges is awesome, what more can I say. I can´t believe it took me this long in life to finally read Borges from cover to cover, as opposed to just the odd Borges tale in class and different compilations. I especially like how the book jacket in this edition includes ¨tigers¨ as one of Borges constant themes, among the more obvious: labyrinths, libraries, detectives, gauchos, and so on. Really, I´ll have to go away for a while and then come back before I can write eloquently about Borges. He makes me want to continue studying literature, and that´s saying something. ¨The South¨ with its amazing last sentence and ¨The Aleph¨ are two of my favorites.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die

I also reread ¨American Gods¨, ¨Three Cups of Tea¨ and ¨The Trial.¨ All good, read-now-recommendable books. I have yet to finish ¨Open Veins of Latin America¨ and ¨Crude Chronicles,¨ both books I´ve started at least two other times during my college days, but alas, have never managed to get all the way through. I don´t know why. It´s just like with me and Virginia Woolf´s (whom I greatly admire) ¨To the Lighthouse¨: there are just some books you have in your life that you always, always begin but never, ever seem to be able to get through.

In other news:
- Our time in Ecuador is drawing to an end! Only three days left!

- Corey´s dad is coming to visit us on September 19th, exactly two days after we get back from Ecuador! He´s staying in the house with us! Hopefully we´ll rent a car and go mushroom hunting! Hopefully I won´t seem hopelessly burnt-out and strung-out in the classic Pachico way, and instead will be able to adopt some of the easy-going, chill nature that is the Way of the Guidrys.

- I have three interviews lined up, two afterschool teaching jobs and one at a Boys & Girls club.

- I decided not to apply for the Fulbright because 1) I´m too lazy to finish the application, 2) I don´t really want to do it, even in the rare chance that I actuall got it, and 3) our new housemate-roommate is a Fulbright scholar himself and a bit of a turd who wants to work for the F.B.I. and corporate America and dismissed the Fulbright as ¨something that´ll make my resume look good¨ as opposed to an opportunity to do something genuinely wicked cool and helpful and great and amazing. I know you´re not supposed to let one bad apple spoil the barrell, but still, the exchange left a sour taste in my mouth about the whole thing. I think I´d rather do cool stuff on my own, as opposed to on the federal government dollar, bearing the time when I actualyly *want* and *need* it, as opposed to just applying out of my half-assed tendency to want to apply for EVERYTHING.

- I´ve been doing a cleanse/juice fast, just because it felt like it was the right time for it. I never thought I would be full from just drinking maracuya juice, but there you go. This has been a good way for me to learn to 1) exercise my willpower and self-control, two things that definitely always need constant work, and 2) how to be hungry without being cranky and intolerable, as I usually am. We´ll see how I feel by the end of today. Will I feel high and detached in the best Zen sense, or merely... intolerable?

Books Read So Far in Ecuador

I´ve been in Ecaudor for almost two months now, so I thought I´d do a little catch-up on what books I´ve been reading here, during that time.


Quarantine by Jim Crace
This is the first book I read in Ecuador, during that first week when we were bussing across the country with Jess´ parents. I´d read it before back in ninth grade, but I think (no, I know) most of it went over my head. The main scene I remembered from the first time I read it is the part when a dead donkey is thrown off the cliff but the other folks in quarantine, and Jesus in his little cave, twitching in a hallucinatory state, thinks that it´s a demon-angel falling from the heavens to further test his will.

I love historical retelling what-if fiction, and this one is particularly delicious since the particular history it reinterprets is Jesus´ 40 days in the desert. Such a set-up leads to numerous great scenes as Jesus descends further into hunger and nakedness and bare desert craziness (to paraphrase ¨Lawerence of Arabia¨: ¨only gods and Bedouins enjoy the desert, Lawrence, and you´re neither¨). I especially like the parts describing just how damn boring it gets, being in the desert for forty days and forty nights--in this novel, Jesus deals with his boredom by writing words from Roman coins with his fingers in the sand and soon he finds this more useful and rewarding than his prayers.

I like how in the end, Jesus´ miracle abilities are left ambiguous. Is he just the Galilean equivalent of ¨Into the Wild,¨ or genuine miracle man? Also, I thought it was really interesting that Jesus´ biggest fan throughout the book was the supposed villain, the merchant. In the end I couldn´t decide if this was a kind of dramatic irony--the reader knows the merchant is right in the end, perhaps granting him a little more sympathy--or if it was supposed to be a kind of commentary on the ultimate commercialization and marketeability of Jesus. It makes sense in a way, that Jesus´ biggest cheerleader would be a merchant: Jesus as brand product has certainly led to a lot of money for a lot of people, as the merchant in ¨Quarantine¨ astutely and accurately sensed.

Rating: Read This Book

I Came Not Alone by I don´t remember

I picked this up off of Jess and Brian´s bookshelf and read it in a single session during one of those rare time-off days we had, hanging around in Quito. I wanted to read namely because it is about a foreigner living in Ecuador in the 60´s, in the same neighborhood as us (good old Guapulo). Unfortunately, reading it for the sake of seeing familar street names and bus routes in print turned out to be the most worthwhile thing about this book. Written by a Peace Corps guy, it made me doubly glad that I ended up turning them down: maybe things have changed in the past forty years, but this guy was a total stooge, partying all the time, looking down on the local people, and generally doing crap at his work. OK, maybe I´m being too judgemental, but he definitely is a poor writer.

Rating: Don´t Read This Book


The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

I read this before and during the Mycotour. It took a long time but I got through it, whereas I´d never managed to completely tackle ¨No Logo¨ in full. This is an awesome book. I think I finally understand what neoliberalism is--maybe. Mind you, Klein has a thesis and a specific political stance from which she argues that thesis, which is fine by me--what´s the point in trying to be objective or impartial, when that´s obviously impossible? Better to be ballsy. She really hammers you over the head with her argument, though. I´d recommend skipping the chapters on Poland, Russia and China, and instead read the parts on Argentina, Chile and Bolivia (the most interesting of the book), the section on Iraq, and the last chapters on the tsunami and New Orleands. Oh, and the very fine introduction and conclusion, of course. All that should be more than enough to drive her point home.

After writing a puny paltry thesis meeself, I have great appreciation and admiration for Klein´s clear and readable style, the way she carefully organizes the points in her argument, her topic senteces (man! can this lady make transitions!). Very smart lady and very smart, relevant book, which left me with a lot to think about.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die



Tales of a Shaman´s Apprentice by Mark J. Plotkin

Corey and I slowly but surely read this book together, reading it aloud to each other before going to sleep each night (a hobby we first started with Cormac McCarthy´s ¨The Road,¨ which is a great book to read aloud, by the way!). This is a good book to read when you´re working or even just visiting the jungle. The author is very much not a dry scientist at all, but instead fills his novel with plenty of funny, strange anecdotes (especially memorable is when a hallucinogenic plant dust is blown up his nose with great force by a blowpipe) and lots of interesting asides about the chemistry and use of so and so plant. I could have done with less copy-paste excerpts from eighteenth-century naturalist-botany texts, though.

Rating: Read This Book



Savages by Joe Klein

It took me yonkers to finish this book, namely because it kept disappearing. I finally got to finish it in Yasuni Park, by the Shirpuno River, which appropriately enough is Huaorani territory and one of the primary settings of the book. I even got to meet the guy on the cover, Moi, at the Shiripuno Bridge, which was very exciting. I was appropriately tongue-tied and starstruck, most likely to his great amusement.

This is a great book to read if you´re looking to understand in greater detail the effect of oil development in the eastern Oriente (or Amazon) of Ecuador. Klein´s carries on the great journalist tradition of Orwell, in which the observer´s present and his private opinions of the matters at hand are acknowledged, rather than ignored or disguised. Particularly memorable is Klein´s story of being lost in the jungle with the twelve-year-old Huaorani guides (one of whom who walks everywhere with a single white sock on his foot, slapping against the mud), with no food, no dry clothing and no idea where they are, and Klein is forced to deal with the sentiment that very few of us would every like to confront in our lifetmes: the feeling that one is going to die, in the jungle, lost, wet, and scared witless. Pretty gripping stuff.

Klein ends the book with a simple yet important question: if oil development is to be done in Ecuador (and the argument that it is inevitable is a strong one), and if it´s going to be done on indigenous land, shouldn´t there at least be an effort on the oil companies parts to at least know whose land they are using? In other words, to sum up the final message that I gleaned from the book: what a bloody mess.

Rating: Read This Book



Wizard of the Upper Amazon by F. Bruce Lamb

Wow, the synopsis of this book is crazy: a young Peruvian teenager, working as a rubber tree cutter in the Peru-Brazilian rainforest in the early 20th century, gets kidnapped by an uncontacted tribe of Indians and raised among the community, who has the intention of making his chief. Say what?? Why haven´t I heard of this crazy story earlier, or at least, why hasn´t there been an extensive, detailed ethnography published about it? (I certainly hope so--anthropology is not my field!) The story is so crazy, that I actually wished this book was longer, and went into more detail. Because of the book´s brevity (a hundred something pages), a lot of stuff I wanted to hear more about was skimped over: like the feeling of being in a totally alien community, not knowing the language, the customs, the culture or anything. The book is written with little self-analysis or introspection and kind of just moves from one interesting anecdote to another, which is fine, but I was definitely left craving more. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the story was retold by a source who met the guy, rather than by the guy himself? Anyway, the definite highlight of the book are the descriptions of the ayahuasca ceremonies. Very trippy (haha) and interesting stuff.

Rating: Read This Book



Prey by Michael Chricton

Man, if this book hadn´t been published almost a decade ago, I would call this Chricton´s comeback. I read this on a hammock in Yasuni, in between bouts of leading Swiss and French tourists around the jungle. It was definitely a very good braindead book for my dead stressed brain. I mean, the part where the killer nanorobots start infecting humans and become transmitted by kisses is a little far fetched, but what else can you ask from a book about killer nanorobots? I like typing that: Nanorobots. Yessss.

Rating: Maybe Read This Book, If You´re In the Right Place and Mood



Tropical Nature: Life and Death in the Rainforests of Central and South America by Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miyata

This is a good book to read if you know obviously nothing about rainforests and tropical ecosystems and botany (raises hand). Wait, (lowers hand), I know more now than I did before, ´cause I´ve read this book! The authors go out of their way to discount the stereotypical dry, boring scientist-writing, and instead use a style that is engaging, entertaining and highly readable. Each chapter is about a different aspect of the rainforest, such as fruit, orchids, ants (memorably called ¨Tiny Socialists¨ by the chapter title) and matapalo, or the killer strangler figs. I am now filled with knowledge about the rainforest that is probably basic to all scientists, but extremely exciting for me. For example, did you know that the sloth buries its poop at the bottom of a tree, which possibly indicates a symbiotic relationship between the two? DIDN´T THINK SO. The sloth eats the tree´s fruit and doesn´t move, since he´s a sloth, while the tree benefits from the fertility of the sloth´s poop. SRSLY.

Rating: Read This Book



Respiracion Artificial by Ricardo Piglia

Corey stumbled into this book for me after meeting an Argentenian at a house party in Guapulo and somehow ended up discussing Faulkner and Onetti (THEESISYES!!). I was in the jungle at the time, but the Argentinean ended up lending Corey this book, which he promptly delivered to me in Yasuni. On the first page someone wrote ¨! Este libro no se presta. No insiste.¨ (This book is not to be lent. I don´t insist). So I don´t know whether to be flattered or confused that this ended up in my grubby hands.

Anyway, this is a great, great book. I should have read this book for my thesis. I am seriously grinding the tip of its spine against my skull in self frustration. I used Piglia´s essays from Critica y ficcion, and I remember my advisor reading some excerpts from Respiracion artificial to me, but what with everything going on... I just never got around to actually reading it, I guess. It made for a great, exciting walk down memory lane, right off the bat with the T.S. Eliot epigraph: ¨We had the experience but missed the meaning, an approach to the meaning restores the experience.¨ OH SNAP SECOND CHAPTER! I got a little lost during the last 50 pages, but that was likely a result of the classic Julie-reading-fast-in-eagerness-to-get-to-the-end symptom.

How do I even begin talking about this book and how it´s now offcially one of my favorite books ever? Every page of this book was like a delicious treat, like an interesting, fascinating conversation. The plot is impossible to summarize. On one level (and there are many), it deals with a nephew corresponding with his uncle, who is obsessed with researching the life of a man called Enrique Ossorios, who was writing a novel. This book brings new meaning to the phrase ¨cake layers¨, the novel´s intricate layering go above and beyond the cake. More than anything, I loved this book because it is so obviously written by someone who himself loves books, intensely and absolutely. Indeed, the love of books is an important theme. The second page discusses the nephew´s failed novel, an attempt to imitate the voice of Faulkner, but as translated by Borges, which instead ends up as nothing more than a bad parody of Onetti. Oh, it makes me tingle just to remember it. This book makes me tingle, and when you have time and space in your life, please read it.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die