Dark Star Safari

(Cross-post)

The book chronicles Theroux's grueling journey through Africa in the early Gregorian millenium (like 2002 or something, not sure I ever quite figured out what year). Traveling overland almost the whole way, he begins in Cairo, Egypt and concludes his trip in Capetown, South Africa. It is, no doubt, an awe-inspiring undertaking, Theroux even risking his life at one point as he and the rest of the disinclined passengers on a beat-up cattle truck are shot at by shifta as they travel from the Ethiopian border through the Kenyan outskirts via the Bandit Road.

Although sizeably shorter than the passages on some of the other many countries like Malawi and South Africa, I was obviously most interested in his time in Ethiopia. He splits his time there between Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa, Harar and Rastaland, finally exiting Ethiopia courtesy of endearing new friends, Tadelle from Tigre (who calls people he doesn't like "termites" in English) and a young man named Wolde who weeps at their parting. He probably spends less time in Addis, but does meet a few interesting characters and says upon landing there, "Ethiopia had just ended its border war with Eritrea. Because of the rumors of that war, Ethiopia's neighbors of low repute - Somalia and Sudan - and the paranoia of travelers, Addis had no foreign tourists. Empty hotels were wonderful for me to behold because I never made any forward plans. I just showed up and hoped." The manner in which he further describes the city is not entirely flattering.

Of Dire Dawa, it "looked like the sort of French colonial railway town I had seen in rural Vietnam, the sort of town on any railway line built a hundred years ago by Europeans." There he speaks Spanish to a woman hawking herbs, her explaining she learned it from the Cuban soldiers living in Dire Dawa around 1974 at the time of the Derg.

In Harar he babbles on about Arthur Rimbaud living out his eccentricities there, he visits the hyena man and also visits the house that Haile Selassie occupied as governor of Harar "before becoming Ras Tafari, Makonnen, Lion of Judah, Elect of God, in a word - emperor."
In Rastaland (Shashemene), he meets Gladstone Robinson and a young, quasi-militant Rastafarian named Patrick who says to him, "The millenium hasn't come yet... The Ethiopian calendar is behind seven years and eight months, so the millenium is coming in about six years. You will see. The earth destroyed by water. It will be fire next time. The Rift Valley will be spared - and it will be the safest place in the world when the fire comes. You can come and be a refugee here. Bring your family."

Generally speaking, he offers few if any compliments about Africa. (The interested should know that decades before the book was written Theroux lived in Africa for a long time; Malawi and Uganda. Originally posted in Nyasaland as he refers to it (former name of Malawi) by the Peace Corps, Theroux was deported for helping a friend deemed anti-Banda by the Banda regime. He landed in Uganda where he became a professor at a University, then seemingly abruptly left there a short time later under political duress.) Throughout the book, Theroux is decidedly negative, largely condescending and scathingly pessimistic about Africa. One thing he has a particular low tolerance, if not a healthy disdain, for are aid organizations. A reader ignorant, much like myself, to the macro realities and consequences of aid and it's many shapes and forms in Africa is much at a loss to ascertain whether Thoreaux even in part rightly or wrongly blames aid agencies for 'wrecking the continent' and effectively acting as "agents of subversion". Although he indicates at one point that he places the onus of change (read "development") on Africans themselves, as to describe the sinister acts of foreign aid workers driving about in their effervescent "landrovers" he even cites to Henry David Thoreau quoting,

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve."

I found the giant over-looming irony of the book to be that Theroux was in love with Africa and ostensibly that's why he even went back in the first place. Certainly, the reader comes away thinking his reunion with the so-called "Dark Star" is anything but whimsical and romantic. Perhaps his charmed remembrance was soured by some of the reality he forgot? Who knows. If you take the book at it's word, Africa has been on a steady and quite steep downhill jaunt since the 1960s. But, make no mistake, however inflammatory or agitated his attitude progressively becomes as he rustles his way through the greenest continent, his writing is fall-over incredible. If you read it with a grain of salt (and I think you have to if you want to enjoy the book for more than it's amazing writing style, his opinion is only one of many afterall), you can relish the book's content rife with juicy history and details you possibly didn't know before about some of the unique countries in Africa he travels to. And he truly, truly takes you on the impressive journey with him, you see what he sees, you smell what he smells, you bask in his travel triumphs, and you even (or I did) laugh at some of his caustic humor. As far as his writing goes, he is a total master even if a snarky, self-important one.

JOHN UPDIKE : MARCH 18, 1932 - JANUARY 27, 2009

The ancients said the purpose of poetry, of writing, was to entertain and to instruct; Aristotle put forward the still fascinating notion that a dramatic action, however terrible and piteous, carries off at the end, in catharsis, the morbid, personal, subjective impurities of our emotions. The enlargement of sympathy, through identification with the lives of fictional others, is frequently presented as an aim of narrative; D. H. Lawrence, with characteristic fervor, wrote, "And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flows of our sympathetic consciousness, and can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things that are dead." Kafka wrote that a book is an ax to break the frozen sea within us.

- John Updike - from Why Write?

the death of john updike today, happening today, is odd for me. i am not an admirer of mr. updike. never have been. (although i relish that image in his story "A&P" when the girl pulls the dollars bills out of the top of her bikini right in front of the pubescent check-out boy, and he says, "I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known." that is so rightfully pubescent.) however, i up and decided to read some snippets of updike's "Why Write?" today. just this morning. the first time i have read or thought of updike since early last fall. and now, just a few moments ago, my office mate tells me he died. and i had only been with him within the hours.

life is odd in the way it comes and goes, passing without permission in either direction, large and loud and owning the entire road, as if it were the only thing that mattered.

WHAT MADE THE HAMSTER THRILL TODAY IN A WINGED-BACK CHAIR WITH GOOD COFFEES AND HIS NON-CYBORGIAN SPOUSE NEARBY

so i'm in this science-fiction bookclub. i've never read the science-fiction before. it's all new to me, as if i'm listening to klingon war ballads set to ukuleles. in the sci-fi, my eyeballs feel as lost on the page as my feet on the intergalactic dancefloor. but i'm learning. and the rhythm is climbing up my thighs, just about to hit my swinging hips. watch out, all ye worlds.

my friend tim recently got the sci-fi ball rolling with a small klatch of us bryan, texas literarians. thus far we have read FRANKENSTEIN by mary shelley, THE TIME MACHINE and THE WAR OF THE WORLDS by h. g. wells, and huxley's A BRAVE NEW WORLD. we're having a smashing good time working chronologically through six packs of pale ale and the major eras of science-fiction literature. at the moment, we are reading a smathering of short stories, compiled by our fearless leader tim, all penned and published during the golden age of science-fiction. 

today in a coffeeshop with my lovely bride, who is human and not made of robotics or cyborgian synthetic skin, we grabbed the only two winged-back chairs in the whole place and sat down to our readings. we have found that words and caffeine go so well together, a little tip i give to all of you. and while my wife enriched herself with gabriel garcia marquez, i plowed through the first of fearless leader tim's stories. and then i plowed through that damn thing a second time. and i freaking loved it both times. 

i am writing here to say that i have written my likings of the story over there, quite yonder in another webiverse where i sometimes fly my hamsterian planetary flags. please, i invite you to go there, to roam about and see this thing that made me thrill in that coffeeshop, in one of the only two winged back chairs remaining. life, really, it is too short not to thrill over words in winged back chairs, with good coffees and beautiful spouses nearby. so, yes, i invite you, even if you do not read the sci-fi, as i recently did not read the sci-fi, life is too short not to share in the bettering thrills of one another. 

thanks to clarks for reminding me to place my musings over here. i would have carried all this around in my pockets for weeks, my pant's legs getting heavy, thereby losing the ukulele war ballad groove that's almost to my hips by now. 

The (not-so) Great Gatsby?

Since this is open game on here I was going to write a mock book review on "Twilight" and suggest that everyone read it in light of the fact that it's a major block buster thriller movie right now, but as much as I really did enjoy it, I couldn't do it with a straight face. :)

So on a slightly deeper literary note:

I wonder if anyone was ever insulted by the word 'scally-wag'. "You scally-wag". Really?

Today I just finished the book The Great Gatsby after completing it 10 years ago as a mandatory High School reading assignment. I read it in two days which may have been a little too quick because I still don't get it. Please don't slap me my literary genius friends! It's called The Great American Masterpiece. Why? Don't get me wrong, I like it and all, it was enjoyable and great with a lower-case "g", but as far as Great goes, na-uh. I wish I was smart. I'm not trying to be self-deprecating or anything, just when it comes to literature comprehension I suck. That is probably why I never got into poetry, too speculative. I would always guess 'sex' when my teacher asked what the poem was about and usually that was the right answer. I could just get online and look up the cliff-notes version on this and appear more intelligent and then snobbily say "ohhh now The Great Gatsby is a classic piece of American literature that well captures the pre-depression area of the roaring twenties and the post Great War attitudes of the people escaping from the Victorian-era moral confines." I totally just made that up. That is how I got good grades in High School. I bs'd.

But back to The Great Gatsby, what is it about it that draws people in? Gatsby isn't a really likable character, he's a liar and a self-absorbed jerk. Daisy isn't likable either for even more reasons. Please don't say something like, "it's their flaws that make them so beautiful" because that's crap. They are so careless of what their actions do to harm everyone around them. I enjoyed reading about the culture that they were living in, the fabulously wealthy people who were probably similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald's own friends and contemporaries. The writing was great, he is amazing, and my argument isn't against him or the book itself, it's against this book being called the Great American Masterpiece. I mean really. Tell me why you think it's so great, pretty pretty please.

Aw, man.

I know it; I totally stink. Rottenness.

I'm only on chapter 13 of this, so far, amazing book, and one day, be it forty months from now, I will write about it, and anyone is welcome to write about it now, and By George!, you can write about any ole book you please.

Come on! Don't wait on me. Write about what you're reading. We want to know. Rules are out the window, people, can't you tell?

Apartheid

I did not know until yesterday that apartheid means "separateness" in Afrikaans.

butterfly in the sky

Oh how I need to and want to read Cry, The Beloved Country. 

Let me know what you think about this reading schedule.

Intro - Ch. 6 by Sept 29 

Ch. 12 by Oct. 6

Ch. 19 by Oct. 13

Ch. 28 by Oct. 20

Ch. 36 by Oct 27

Cry, The Beloved Country

Is this the book we're reading next? Just wanted to make sure....

Dillard the Dullard or Wholly the Worm

I want to get this stuff going again.

I read Dillard. I read her in 3 days, devoting one day to each section. I will get into more detail later as we get rolling, but i have some initial statements that may spark your opposition.
I enjoyed her writing. She can write, i'll give her that. I did not like all of it. I felt as though the first section was fantastic. I did not, however, enjoy section 2 for a couple of reasons.

First, it is difficult to critisize poetry as it does not carry with it the same literary logic of non-poetic literature. I am not skilled at critiquing either, but i felt as though some of her sentences, possibly even sections were nonsensical. I thought after reading that section that she wrote some stuff that did not add at all to her subtle points or to her overt ones.

Secondly, i didn't enjoy the sections of blatant critical questioning and asserting she did regarding God. This is just me. Some people eat that stuff up because it makes them feel better knowing that others have questions too and also that they can formulate them so systematically. I do not. It makes me have a sour feeling in my belly. It makes me think of when one boy in gradeschool flips someone off and then another boy gives him a high five. I know it's wrong as a little kid, and even though i do think of giving the finger sometimes, it doesn't mean i take pride in the fact that someone else is doing it.

She redeems herself though in the last section which i also thought was fantastic. To date, one of my favorite sections in the book was her description of the moth catching fire and the way she brings it back at the end. OH, SO GOOD.

What say the masses?
Will i be alone in my critical ditch again?

PS. the title was just to catch attention. i quite liked this stuff.

OPEN LETTER TO A STRANGER

dear olivia,

i am still reading SILENCE. got slowed down by the onslaught of the semester. but this book is double-capital GGood. seriously. i may need to ask you for a small list of literary recommendations. go ahead and toss in some film choices, too. i'd be interested to know what films you dig up in all your reading.

i may be further delayed in my finishing of SILENCE because i'm scheduled to lead a bookclub discussion of FRANKENSTEIN next week with some dudes here in the republic. i think we're going to sip some ales and talk some monster and watch a FRANKEN-groovy film of some sort. i'll keep the online bookclub posted how that turns out. should be a bolting blast of a good time.

yes, i am completely aware that i have not answered your question about me and the wife's churchiness. not that i think you're out there losing sleep over it - but you ask, and i told you that i would tell you. just trying to keep us both true to our word. truth is: it's complicated. or maybe it's too simple to get into words. honestly, i've starting writing you that response about four times, only to go "what the eff am i saying?" we'll get to it.

also, i accidentally made my oatmeal too lumpy this morning. you see, i made it in this little transparent tupperware container as opposed to the normal white ceramic bowls from crate and barrel somebody gave us for a wedding gift. i think the transluscence of the tupperware disrupted the depth-perception of my visual field, causing me to pour in less boiling water than usual. not that i want my oatmeal soupy, you see, but i sure do not like the sensation of eating volleyball beach sand. life is one big school room, and i'm getting learned in the finer things every damn day.

alright. enough already. peace out.

-hamster