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Aug. 22nd, 2010 12:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionApparently Sean Penn's been planning to film Carpentier's The Lost Steps in Venezuela, with Hugo Chavez' help.
It's one of the twenty or so books I started this summer. None yet finished, for reasons given ad nauseam here.
Explosion in the Cathedral, a startlingly great novel, was filmed for French TV in the '90s, with what results I don't know. I was reading it nights when my father was dying, in a chair in the hospital room, and wished I could talk to him about it. To argue, really; he was omniscient about Spanish-American history but also a Nixonian Republican. I'm a small-C communist who thinks we'd all be happiest in village-modeled social units within a socialist atheist civil-libertartian global system but also sees no evidence that that will ever happen. I'm not a Taoist - I don't think we can't fight the world as a matter of principle. I just think that we can't, won't, don't, probably shouldn't on any large scale because it's huge, old, complicated, and fucking terrifying. But somehow trying is something I find romantic in every sense, so long as no truth-crippling short cuts are employed. Actually even those falls from grace are kind of beautiful, but as sad warnings. Hence my passionate hatred of Marxism, or anyway action-oriented Marxism. You know, the ism part.
My father got tenure just before campus Marxists (neo-Marxists?) took over his department and was thereafter the lowest paid and most overworked Associate English professor at OSU for the first 20 or so years I knew him. They somehow found ways to deny him sabbaticals, which caused him the most pain - he was always sketching out projects he never had time to pursue. My political beliefs fascinated but annoyed him, so used as he was to eliding the Left with Marxism in his inner hate romance. They fascinate and annoy me too, but I wouldn't know how to change them. Anyway, the book's pretty relevant to all that.
Kingdom of This World's great too.
It's one of the twenty or so books I started this summer. None yet finished, for reasons given ad nauseam here.
Explosion in the Cathedral, a startlingly great novel, was filmed for French TV in the '90s, with what results I don't know. I was reading it nights when my father was dying, in a chair in the hospital room, and wished I could talk to him about it. To argue, really; he was omniscient about Spanish-American history but also a Nixonian Republican. I'm a small-C communist who thinks we'd all be happiest in village-modeled social units within a socialist atheist civil-libertartian global system but also sees no evidence that that will ever happen. I'm not a Taoist - I don't think we can't fight the world as a matter of principle. I just think that we can't, won't, don't, probably shouldn't on any large scale because it's huge, old, complicated, and fucking terrifying. But somehow trying is something I find romantic in every sense, so long as no truth-crippling short cuts are employed. Actually even those falls from grace are kind of beautiful, but as sad warnings. Hence my passionate hatred of Marxism, or anyway action-oriented Marxism. You know, the ism part.
My father got tenure just before campus Marxists (neo-Marxists?) took over his department and was thereafter the lowest paid and most overworked Associate English professor at OSU for the first 20 or so years I knew him. They somehow found ways to deny him sabbaticals, which caused him the most pain - he was always sketching out projects he never had time to pursue. My political beliefs fascinated but annoyed him, so used as he was to eliding the Left with Marxism in his inner hate romance. They fascinate and annoy me too, but I wouldn't know how to change them. Anyway, the book's pretty relevant to all that.
Kingdom of This World's great too.
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Date: 2010-08-22 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-23 04:43 am (UTC)