READIN

Sunday, March 27th, 2011

🦋 Jacob's Travels: Bad Faith in Genesis

So after some further reading and reflection, I'm not so convinced that José Arcadio Buendía's dream at Macondo is intended as a reference to Jacob's dream at Beth-el... There doesn't really seem to be enough parallels between the two stories to give the reference any weight or any explanatory power. I got the idea from a footnote in the edition of Cien Años de Soledad that I'm reading (ed. Jacques Joset, 2003). Overall the footnotes in this edition seem pretty weak -- or that is to say, there are just unnecessarily many of them. The footnote references Michael Palencia-Roth's book Gabriel García Márquez: La línea, el círculo y las metamorfosis del mito -- who knows, maybe a convincing case for the reference is made there.

I am glad to have seen the note though, since it led me to reread the story of Jacob (Genesis 27 - 35, roughly), a story which I had by and large forgotten, in the kjv translation and in Crumb's illustrated version, and because I found Blake's painting of Jacob's Ladder -- highly productive weekend research! Reading about Jacob's travels back and forth across what would one day be the Holy Land, I felt distressed -- and remembered feeling this same distress in years past -- by the sheer universality of bad faith in the characters' dealings with one another; a bad faith that seems to me to be most pronounced among those who are identified as blessed by God. Just to take a few of the most brazen, least sympathetic instances --

• (This happens in an earlier chapter, but very much setting the tone for the stories to come) Isaac tells the Philistines, when he and Rebekah are staying with them, that Rebekah is his sister rather than his wife, apparently in the expectation that they will rape her but will not molest him. When this deception is exposed, Abimelech shows himself to be just and honorable, forbidding his subjects from troubling either Isaac or his wife. What is this doing in the Hebrew people's national mythology?
• Jacob, at his mother Rebekah's urging, deceives Isaac into giving him the blessing intended for his brother Esau. (This scene strikes me as pretty comical -- why should the lord's blessing be such a limited resource? Is a blessing bestowed under false pretenses even theologically binding?)
• Rebekah deceives Isaac into thinking she is concerned about the lack of non-Caananite brides for Jacob locally, so that Isaac will send Jacob away and he'll be safe from Esau's vengeance.
• Laban deceives Jacob by sending in Leah in place of Rachel on their wedding night. (And again I am befuddled -- what is Rachel's take on this? Leah years later accuses Rachel of stealing her husband, but that does not seem to be consistent with the rest of the narrative.)
• Jacob and Laban deceive one another many times over in the matters of what Jacob will be paid and how Laban's flocks will be managed.

posted afternoon of March 27th, 2011: 1 response
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🦋 Labor history: something I'm wondering about

I read a lot this past week about the fire at Triangle Shirtwaist Factory -- and this is a piece of American history that I consider part of common knowledge, something that people (taking myself as an example) are likely to know about without their having any detailed familiarity with the history of the labor movement in the US. (And indeed I did not know a crucial bit of this piece of history until this week, namely that two years prior to the fire, the Triangle company had successfully broken an effort by its workers to unionize.) Of course it is dangerous to extrapolate from my own experience and knowledge to that of people around me. But I want to pursue this for a minute.

Lessie Jo Frazier talks in Salt in the Sand about the process of institutional memory in Chile, whereby the massacre at St. Mary's School of Iquique is remembered as a totem, as a way of forgetting similar repressive events in the history of Chile's labor movement. This is making me wonder if there's a similar process in place here in the US, whereby one factory fire stands in for a whole class of events, a whole period of history, and what memories are lost in this process, what distortions are introduced. I ultimately don't have much to say about this -- I am not a historian and as I say am extrapolating totally from my own experience -- but thought it might be useful to throw out there.

posted morning of March 27th, 2011: Respond
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Friday, March 25th, 2011

🦋 Labor History: centennial, current

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes--

—Robert Pinsky, Shirt

posted evening of March 25th, 2011: Respond
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Thursday, March 24th, 2011

🦋 Founding Macondo: Jacob's Dream

Some text! Let's look at two longish quotes.

¹⁰And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran. ¹¹And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. ¹²And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. ¹³And, behold, the lord stood above it, and said, I am the lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; ¹⁴And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. ¹⁵And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.

¹⁶And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the lord is in this place; and I knew it not. ¹⁷And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. ¹⁸And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. ¹⁹And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first.

-- Genesis 28 (kjv)

—Está bien, Prudencio —le dijo—. Nos iremos de este pueblo, lo más lejos que podamos, y no regresaremos jamás. Ahora vete tranquilo. Fue así como emprendieron la travesía de la sierra. Varios amigos de José Arcadio Buendía, jóvenes como él, embullados con la aventura, desmantelaron sus casas y cargaron con sus mujeres y sus hijos hacia la tierra que nadie les había prometido. ... Una noche, después de varios meses de andar perdidos por entre los pantanos, lejos ya de los últimos indígenas que encontraron en el camino, acamparon a la orilla de un río pedregoso cuyas aguas parecían un torrente de vidrio helado. Años después, durante la segunda guerra civil, el coronel Aureliano Buendía trató de hacer aquella misma ruta para tomarse a Riohacha por sorpresa, y a los seis días de viaje comprendió que era una locura. Sin embargo, la noche en que acamparon junto al río, las huestes de su padre tenían un aspecto de náufragos sin escapatoria, pero su número había aumentado durante la travesía y todos estaban dispuestos (y lo consiguieron)* a morirse de viejos. José Arcadio Buendía soñó esa noche que en aquel lugar se levantaba una ciudad ruidosa con casas de paredes de espejo. Preguntó qué ciudad era aquella, y le contestaron con un nombre que nunca había oído, que no tenía significado alguno, pero que tuvo en el sueño una resonancia sobrenatural: Macondo.

—It's OK, Prudencio —he said—. We'll leave this town, we'll go as far away as we can, we'll never come back. You can rest easy. And this was how they began their crossing of the mountain. Several friends of José Arcadio Buendía, young men like him, with a taste for adventure, packed up their households and set out with their wives and their kids for the land which no-one had promised them. ... One night, after months of wandering through the marshes with no bearings, far beyond the last Indians they had met in their travels, they camped on the gravely bank of a river whose waters had the aspect of a torrent of frozen glass. Years later, during the second civil war, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would attempt to take the same route, in order to attack Riohacha by surprise; after six days of travel he saw that it was madness. On the night when they camped by the river, his father's army looked like a band of castaways with no prospect of salvation -- but nevertheless their numbers had increased during the crossing; and everyone there was meaning to die of old age. (They succeeded in this goal.) José Arcadio Buendía dreamt that night that on this spot a city was being erected, an obstreperous city, a city with walls of mirrors. He asked what city this was, and the reply was a name which he had never heard, which had no significance whatever, but which in the dream, took on a supernatural resonance: Macondo.

—Cien años de soledad, Chapter 2

* I am not sure what this means. Gregory Rabassa renders it literally in his translation, "and they succeeded"; but it does not mean anything in English. I am leaving it out of my translation. My best guess is that it means some of the travellers *did* die of exhaustion; but no mention of this is made elsewhere, and it seems like it would be a strange thing to throw in with no specifics. ... Got it! (Maybe) -- I think I am misreading this. I wanted "todos estaban dispuestos a morirse de viejos" to mean, "they were ready to drop dead of exhaustion" so I ignored the meaning of the words; viejos is old age, not exhaustion. So estaban dispuestos means "they were ready/prepared" in the sense of what they were planning to do, not what they were about to do -- they meant to die of old age, not to die on the journey. "(and they succeeded)" -- i.e. they did die of old age, years later, not on the journey. I think Rabassa's translation is very unclear. I modified my translation above.

Update: Some further thinking about Jacob (and Macondo) here.

posted evening of March 24th, 2011: Respond
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🦋 Trailer

I missed this hilarious publicity video when Super Sad True Love Story came out. If you did too, take a look:

He came from nowhere... and he's... well, you know, he's still really nowhere...

posted evening of March 24th, 2011: Respond
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Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

🦋 ♄

posted morning of March 23rd, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

🦋 The book thief

Bolaño names Camus' The Fall as the book "that saved me from hell and plummeted me straight back down again... After Camus, everything changed." He stole his copy of The Fall from the Librería Cristal by "carrying it out in plain sight of all the clerks, which is one of the best ways to steal and which I had learned from an Edgar Allan Poe story" -- only to have it confiscated later by security guards at another bookstore.

Very nice bit in this story about meeting Mexican authors on the Calle del Niño Perdido, the Street of the Lost Boy, "a teeming street that my maps of Mexico City hide from me today, as if Niño Perdido could only have existed in my imagination, or as if the street, with its underground stores and street performers had really been lost, just as I got lost at the age of sixteen." It is not on modern maps because the street has been renamed the Eje Central Lázaro Cárdenas; but the street's old name has a romantic story behind it, per Ritos y Retos del Centro Historico.

posted evening of March 22nd, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, March 20th, 2011

🦋 Our own little group read

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon when his father had taken him to learn about ice.

Why now? Why García Márquez?... Just happenstance I guess. I've been carrying the book around in my backpack lately, reading bits of it on the train in to work, savoring the language and the imagery. Yesterday I mentioned it to Ellen and asked if she had ever read it; she has not but said she'd be interested in reading it if I have the translation. And lo and behold, I do! Looking forward to sharing it...

posted morning of March 20th, 2011: Respond
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🦋 Pushing Forty

Happy Birthday to Rex Broome! Broome is the singer and guitarist for Skates & Rays. On his 39th birthday last year he covered Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting for the Man"; today he covers his own tune "Pushing Forty". In between he has recorded one cover version for every day of his fortieth year of life, and/or leaned on friends to contribute their own cover versions. I'm impressed, and gratified to have played my own small part.

posted morning of March 20th, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, March 19th, 2011

🦋 Around Chile

Mientras pensaba en un viaje inminente a San Pedro de Atacama, Jorge López puso unas fotos encantadoras de Viña del Mar:

At South Orange Patch, Marcia Worth reports that Mario Sepulveda will be speaking at Seton Hall next week. Sepulveda is one of the copper miners who were trapped underground at Copiapó last year.

posted afternoon of March 19th, 2011: 6 responses

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