The Bookity Book & Tall Grass Salon

Finally retaking Infinite Jest over here after something of a break.

maxmordon said:

Finally retaking Infinite Jest over here after something of a break.

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That's in my tbr folder. Man I wish I could read faster! Too much good stuff (which is a good problem to have)

I can understand not rememnering much from Acid Test. What's interesting about the style is it's free association around the events, not as much a narrative of the events themselves. That seems.it would make the specifics tough to remember. But the story still comes through.

I really liked today's poem, and I still think Henry Mancini is a great composer...

I mean seriously, the theme from The Pink Panther is among my Top 10 Favorites.

Greatest movie, great theme, great comedy--s6

Good morning.

The Writer's Almanac for October 21, 2014

Comedy. Today's poem is a laugh-out-loud goodie, or was for me.

Magellan entered the strait named for him, and Hemingway published For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Ursula LeGuin were both born on this date. I heard her speak once. I remember only that it took a lot of effort getting to and into the event, which was crowded and large, and that she was very delicate and seemed diminished. I remember liking what she said but I can't at all remember what it was. She was part of a much larger program, sort of the icing on the cake appearance. I do remember sitting through a bunch of stuff I wasn't interested in, particularly, in order to hear her.

"the great Irish pig farmers
and Armenian raisin growers"
LOL...

I thought the paragraphs about Coleridge humanized him. Rime of the Ancient Mariner was a struggle for me. Also, I recently read The Paris Wife, about Hemingway's first (naive) wife. It was a story I didn't know and it humanized the writer god (in his own eyes). Of course, he ended up being a you-know-what, but for a while there I was really rooting for him.

Ok, back to the endless manuscript.

Yeah, Shadow, I can see how it's depressing. A visit to the book store can royally bum me out. So many books getting published, many of them worse than mine. But looked at another way, humble raisin farmers are great because they are authentically themselves. If I'm authentically myself then I have a chance at my own brand of greatness, even if my books never fly off the shelves (or get on the shelves in the first place).

I think Columbus gets maligned because his were so overtly voyages of conquest and profit driven. Magellan, even if he was after profit and opened the door to profit-driven conquest, didn't establish colonies to exploit local workers or riches. I honestly don't know enough about Magellan's voyage to say it was all sweetness and light adventure, but that's how history remembers them.

Tangential trivia time! The Western Hemisphere is named mostly for Amerigo Vespucci, who was the first person, in the late 1490s, to determine that what Columbus discovered was not Asia or even isolated islands, but in fact a huge as-yet unknown landmass. He first landed at present-day Suriname (I think), and kept bouncing down the coast of South America expecting to find the end. He never did, and returned to Europe with the best maps of the New World at that time. I think it was a German mapmaker who dubbed the new land "America," which has a much nicer ring than "Vespuccia" and I'd rather not be known as a "Vespuccian."

Magellan never had much to do with me.

With Columbus, it's personal.

Maryn said:

Tangents like this are why I keep coming here.

Maryn, honest

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That, and the poems.

I fought with my teachers. They were wrong SO often, and I was a brat. Some of them handled it well; others not so.

I never understood why the US had a Colombus Day and Thanksgiving. They seem to commemorate to me pretty much the very same thing, except Thanksgiving is actually relevant to the North American history.

For Latin America, it's a pandora box full of mixed feelings and harsh realities that foce us to face contradictions and how heterogenius our culture is. Conquistadors did a full-on genocide here, nobody doubts that, but how can we denounce them without being hipocritical and identify ourselves with the natives and denounce the Spaniards (as is the usual posture about it nowadays) when they are also part of us and we identify their language, culture, religion and whatnot closer to them than anybody else? How we face ourselves in the mirror when we see the rapist and the rape victim looking back? You see this identity problem on how Latin American countries don't know how to call October 12th: Race Day, Hispanic Day, Cultural Diversity Day, Pan-American People Day, Indigenous Struggle Day, Encounter of Two Worlds, etc.

I never understood how complex was this situation until I visited Peru and Ecuador. Venezuela was a rather unimportant colony and besides churches and fortresses, very little of our colonial times remains but everyone agrees how criminal the Conquistadors were, considering how indigenous population is less than 5% (against 50% who are of mixed race). They forced natives to hard labor and when they started to died out, they brought in African slaves. Even the priests of that era denounce how inhuman those conditions were.

But in Peru and Ecuador, were the indigenous population roughly goes 20 to 40%, there seemed to be a sense of pride about their colonial times, with portraits of their colonial governors in the museums along paintings and royal regalia of the Inca emperors, the Lima cathedral had the remains of Francisco Pizarro and St. Turibius, who translated the Bible to Quecha and Cuzco has its main square with a statue of an Inca emperor in front of a cathedral completely adorned with gold and silver by Spaniards, a half-Sun Temple and half monastery and natives who charge you to take a picture with them and an Alpaca.

And I wonder, is this a facade to put for tourists, a continuous whitewash to not suffer the cultural burden of contradiction or a people who have embraced the best and worst of their ancestors?

And then there's the whole new level of independence. I was surrpised in college to discover that natives had it worst here in Venezuela after we became an independent country since the Church-run indigenous enclaves were dissolved and natives were forced integrate society, pretty much watering down their culture to non-existence, those who did not integrate were the ones to survive nowadays in the Amazon jungle, the Orinoco delta and the Guajira Penninsula.

And ours was just ignorance, Chile and Argentina manipulated the natives of Patagonia to earn territory from the other until Argentina did a full-on war on the natives called The Conquest of the Desert whose commander was later elected president twice and was, until recently, on the Argentine 100 peso bill along with a painting of him and the cavalry on the pampas.

I love cachapas. They are a corn-dough pancake invented, if I'm not mistaken, by the Carib people. I consider cachapas part of my Venezuelan identity, my Latino identity. I consider beautiful the idea of the Latino culture because it means I'm bound from the descendants of the Aztecs and Mayans in Mexico to a third generation Japanese-Peruvian to some century-old Ashkenazi family in Buenos Aires, despite how diverse we are. I know at least two thirds of my ancestors come from Canary Islands, but I feel no connection to them or their culture. From early on, I have been told our culture, our people, our race is mixed. But I wonder, where does that leave the natives? Those who named my hometown, my home state and many words I use whose etimologies have been lost in time?

Sometimes I think the words of Arturo Uslar Pietri: If the British had arrived instead of the Spaniards, Mexico would be a second India. The British seldom mixed with anyone, Spaniards did and a lot. They both created empires and both were brutal in their own, idiosyncrastic ways. I was begotten from the brutality of the latter, but I'm freightened if this means I have programmed to justify genocide. If I'm a puddle of water who is sure the hole he lays in is perfect, because that's the hole he has live in his entire existence.

Kylabelle said:

I fought with my teachers. They were wrong SO often, and I was a brat. Some of them handled it well; others not so.

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I got into existential debates twice with teachers in elementary school. The first time I claimed borders were man-made and therefore invisible and non-existant and the second time I was asked how God looked like and said a being like God, who created the universe and supposedly care about us, could take any shape and means of communications he wanted to each one of us. They kept asking until I said he was and old bearded dude wearing a robe with a nice, soothing voice.

I don't think things have changed much in the validity of what kids are taught. Has anyone been following the textbook debate in Texas or Colorado?

Off my soapbox now...

*raaaage!!!* I spent twenty minutes typing a reply based on what I observed in Uganda regarding conialism, and the stupid touchscreen tablet ate it because I probably breathed on the wrong part of the screen. Anyway, great discussion, especially your perspective Max and Kuwi and perhaps I'll try again when I get on the laptop.

Chris P said:

*raaaage!!!* I spent twenty minutes typing a reply based on what I observed in Uganda regarding conialism, and the stupid touchscreen tablet ate it because I probably breathed on the wrong part of the screen. Anyway, great discussion, especially your perspective Max and Kuwi and perhaps I'll try again when I get on the laptop.

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God, I hate when that happens. That's why I usually write/save them on the tablet notepad, since my has the weird habit of closing the browser. I suspect it's the cache, but really I don't know.

Ah shucks, Chris! Sorry we missed your fresh thoughts. And by "fresh" I only mean "of the moment", you know.

Columbus Day is sometimes turned into Indigenous People's Day, in some places. Not here though.

Honestly the whole ugly story of European colonialism and imperial expansion is sickening to me. I know a "balanced" view is supposed to see the benefits that have come from it but I am not a very balanced person and don't believe that horseshit.

Yet, here I am in this body of European and a little American Indian mixed origins, and possibly a few other little bits here and there.... so where I get to with it all is just that here we are all in this world together, now, and we'd best learn how to honor and respect all of it as well as we can.

Chris, I'm guessing you yourself have some experience, perhaps, with some beneficial aspects of colonialism? If any among us does I'm betting it's you. Though I don't want to assume anything.

I think there's plenty to be proud of in American history without white-washing the ugly parts, and there's plenty of ugliness in colonialism and imperialism.

I'll just leave this here. (Watch it — it's really cool. And really intelligent and funny. And ironic.)

Okay, on the laptop now.

British colonialism was less brutal in Uganda than in the New World, but no less exploitive. The locals were a cheap work force, end of story. That was the point of colonialism: to fill the coffers and make goods available in the home country. I can't remember who it was (John Maynard Keynes?), but about 100 years a noteworthy person commented on how easy it was for an English gentleman to order the most exotic delights of the world from his fireside through a catalog. I have mixed feelings when I visit museums in England. On one hand, the appreciation of other cultures in many English kids was no doubt sparked by seeing the world's treasures in the V&A, and I enjoy seeing them too, but England's wealth and my ability to see it there came at the price of another country's wealth and heritage. When are we honoring, and when are we exploiting?

Many people (notably the author Paul Thereoux, of Mosquito Coast fame) argue that Africa was better off under colonialism. I'm not going to try to recall his exact words, but the idea is that the foreign powers had a vested interest in a healthy, productive workforce and in infrastructure developments. Once rule was turned over to the locals (now I'm going beyond anything I've read Theroux say and going to extremes) there was no longer any incentive for development since the locals just wanted to go back to "their own ways", and the populace was wholly unprepared to rule itself. Old rivalries flared up, and (ironic phrase here) "things fell apart." Some would argue, with good evidence, that with globalization we have entered a neo-colonial period, where all the old players, with the recent inclusion of China, are simply doing the same old thing under the disguise of a free market. I don't hold such a pessimisitic view, but I do agree it will take a long time to grow out of the legacy of colonialism. As for neo-colonialism, I see some things going right (capacity building, foreign investment with local ownership) and some things going wrong (aggressive evangelism, corruption, etc.).

Wow, that's all new from the eaten post! Which went something like this. 85% of Uganda is under the age of 40, so there are vanishingly few people who remember colonial Uganda. As a result, they don't talk about the British very much, except for some old timers who talk about the King's African Rifles in World War II. There is no collective memory of colonialism, and a critical understanding of history is not rewarded in Ugandan schools; it's all spitting back facts and figures by rote memorization. That's how you pass your tests and get your leaving certificates (aka diplomas to us). That's why African students often struggle in Western universities where critical thinking and synthesis are rewarded, and why anyone who can think for him- or herself never goes back to Africa once they get educated elsewhere (the "Brain Drain."). I wouldn't go back to where my way of thinking wasn't rewarded.

Many people, including many of my friends in the Peace Corps, blame the British for installing that system of education, which is curious to me because British schools are typically very good. Perhaps there was one system they used at home, and a colonial system they used when teaching the locals. But to blame the British solely for that (I think) ignores any pre-existing culture of hospitality that the British were able to exploit. "These are our guests, and we must accommodate them" is the Ugandan attitude, to which the British (as much as I love them and would like to live in the UK) said "Yes, please." That's not meant to victim blame the Ugandans at all. It's just that colonialism couldn't have happened otherwise without armed slaughter (as happened on this side of the Atlantic) (Well, and over there too).

A lot of us also blame the British for the pernicious and aggravating defference Ugandans give to whites. I had many Ugandans say to me "Ah! But you have an American education and the money to come here. Therefore you have the answers. Tell them to me so I can be rich." People like Theroux might argue that aid and neo-colonialism are perpetuating a beggar culture. I see evidence to support that, but I don't think that's the whole answer.

When I left the Peace Corps, the country director asked me what gift, if it were possible, I would give to Uganda. Tough question, but I finally answered that I would give them the self-confidence to realize they can do this on their own. The brain power is there. Considerable resource, infrastructure, and other problems exist, but I saw a heartbreaking lack of self-confidence among the Ugandans I worked with. I think it's a result of a pre-colonial social structure that worked well for them at the time that the colonizers were able to exploit to their own ends.

Okay, more free association there than I intended, and in another two years I might think differently. That's just where I am now with it.

Oops, Chris, you and I cross posted. This was a response to kuwi's post and the video.

That was kind of sweet. As for history, I have never understood being proud of it or ashamed of it either. No argument that good things have happened; of course they have. And of course we can have no idea what might have developed in the absence of a worldwide colonial expansion involving decimation of indigenous people in pretty much every continent. No doubt both good things and bad things would have happened.