More Fall Reading
63. Green Grass, Running Water - Thomas King
Coyote and friends and friends. King’s a great writer and this book is one I’ll probably come back to - I need to learn more about the role of water in this book - how it undermines authority (and cars) while perhaps moving ideas across translated space. Hrm. Maybe I am in the right line of work.
64. Woman Warrior - Maxine Hong Kingston
This book is kind of a Chinese American “Obasan” with a couple of notable deviations. First, it’s much better written and constructed. Second, it deals with mythologies in a way that Kogawa’s book largely failed to do - without necessarily being less politically effective. The Fa Mu Lan story caused a shitshow for the conflation of various mythic Chinese stories and forced Kingston to come out and say that “memoir” isn’t autobiography and, frankly, we should all pay closer attention to that fact.
65. The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
I finally read it and holy crap. Love him or hate him (and there are reasons aplenty for both), this guy is a master story teller. I got into a big argument with some people the other day about postmodernism and how the British never really seemed to understand it at the point when the movement had its greatest relevance…the reason for that, I think, is because they’re still colour-blind. Rushdie moves across peoples and without poco, I think pomo gets seriously handicapped. Rushdie might be a hyper masculine classist pig but at least he gets the harms of race and religion. This book might even be better than Midnight’s Children.
66. The Mimic Men - V.S. Naipul
One extreme to the other…Naipul’s characters are bland and one dimensional, you can see the colour seeping out of them as they perform rote dramas of race and class and sex. Ralph Singh’s as obnoxious a character as any I’ve ever encountered and his misanthropic sociopathy makes me furious - Naipul is either a genius or a rank supercilious bastard for creating Singh and writing this book. Perhaps both. Singh mimics well and provides a scathing critique of his role as the big man who fills the voids in the burgeoning post colonial movements of the fifties and sixties.
67. The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Believe it or not, I had never seen the movie nor read the book before. It’s marvellous - the moment when I first recognized Caravaggio (naked, of course) was epiphanic and while I dearly missed Hana’s father from The Skin of the Lion, the book was nonetheless delightful. All my favourite questions of identity and class and gender were brought forth for discussion in a well told story of love and failure. Man, Ondaatje’s good.
68. Illuminations - Walter Benjamin
I started because I had to read “the task of the translator” and kept going. A couple of the papers I had read before but never this full spectrum - there’s a lot going on in Benjamin that lays groundwork for translation and gender theories even if (especially in the latter) he’s not necessarily working towards that. I also appreciate that he’s willing, during the most rigorous intellectual endeavor, to strive to hold onto the apocalyptic and messianic qualities of social engagement and text. We still, I think, need to be saved by words - not, as Paul de Man and others seem to think, from them.
69. Culture and Imperialism - Edward Said
Before reading this, I had never clearly considered how imperialism and colonialism differ - and what they retain in common. The key ideas here that imperialism gets powered by the control of land a country doesn’t possess, that’s lived on and possessed by other people, makes clear sense. Where does colonialism alter? Perhaps that it’s more overt, which in a currently post-colonial state means that the contemporary paradigm remains imperialist but uses cultural monopoly and control to fill in the gaps where military intervention might be decried by international consortia.
~ Colin
