Recent reading: Nada by Carmen Laforet

One of El País' re-issued classics of Spanish literature, Nada, first published in 1944, is at once a witty and a terrifying look at life in Barcelona in the wake of the Spanish civil war. It is also a pioneer "feminist" novel, where the women characters are every bit as complex (and sometimes just as crazy) as they men who try (with mixed results) to torment them. Finally, it is also a chilling but sympathetic portrait of a great, wounded city. There is an English translation by Glafyra Ennis: Nada. For a fuller note (in Spanish), see today's entry at Lecturas y lectores.

Happy birthday, Relativity!

What are you doing to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's great discovery? Me, I've started reading Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, to make sense of it all. Greene writes, "In June 1905, Einstein wrote a paper with the unassuming title 'On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,' which once and for all spelled the end of the luminiferous aether." (p. 44) I kind of miss it, that comforting glow of something that was never there. But that's all right; Greene is terrific at explaining the biggest questions in the universe, in fact, the universe itself, space and time, and does it in terms even I can follow.

Finding new and surprising things to write

A writer colleague (my buddy Don, see below) asks a question that must occur to any of us whenever we look at a vast collection like the New York Public Library, or even a well-stocked bookstore: Has everything already been written? Sometimes it feels that way, but it won't be, until everything human has already happened. That will be some billions of years hence, when our sun dies. Meanwhile, there are always new events and new twists and even new meaning to old truths.

Proof of that is in the work of those in Robert S. Boynton's new book, The New New Journalism. It includes Boynton's interviews with 19 other practitioners of what Lawrence Weschler calls "writerly nonfiction," and Boynton wants to call "literary" or "creative" of "narrative nonfiction." I like the last term best, to describe what I try to do in my reportorial and essayistic work. At a panel at the Barnes & Noble store in Union Square the other night, I got my first chance to see and hear five of them: Bill Finnegan, Ren Weschler, Ted Conover, Adrian Leblanc and Ron Rosenbaum. They are as different from one another (in temperament, writing style, working methods) as any of them is from me, and in that difference I felt we were really united -- each of us struggling in our own peculiar ways to write the best we can. Reading Ron Rosenbaum and Gay Talese (also in this book) alone gives you an idea of how immensely wide those differences can be, and still produce works we want to read.

Religion undermining democracy?

Check out Don Monkerud, Bush Reaffirms Commitment to Government Support of Religion, IRC Right Web. He concludes, "Compromise becomes impossible when religious groups, which hold to “God’s will,” refuse to make accommodations with secular interests. The last time groups failed to compromise was over slavery. Although conditions today aren’t as volatile as they were during Lincoln’s time, when people are unprepared to compromise, civil war is often the result."

Recommended reading

I just came across this in Milk Magazine: Why The Living Theatre Is Returning to New York, by the in-my-day famous Judith Malina & Hanon Reznikov. Good for them! BTW, I have a story in the same issue, On a Page from Rilke. And check out The Living Theatre and see (among other wonders) a lovely picture of the young Judith Malina. As they say on the website, "Founded in 1947, The Living Theatre has staged more than 80 productions performed in eight languages in 25 countries on four continents - a unique body of work."

Let justice be done

Last week I didn't find time to blog partly because I was on jury duty from Monday to Thursday. I went in enthusiastic about the US jury system, came out much more dubious.

This was a civil case, a 6-person jury to decide a claim for money damages against the city (New York) and Con Edison for defects alleged to have caused a man to fall and injure himself. My co-jurors and I got along well (they elected me foreman), and I think we deliberated as fairly as possible on the evidence we had, but I'm not at all sure that the result was the most just.

Ours is an adversarial system between trial lawyers, and the plaintiff's lawyer was clearly overmatched -- we jurors had lots of further questions that we couldn't answer, because only the lawyers get to question witnesses. There is also the well-known problem of the dynamics in the jury room; one very stubborn personality can change the outcome. This was not what happened in our case, mainly because we had too many stubborn and strong personalities -- whaddaya expect? This is New York -- so nobody was intimidated, but it was easy to see how that could happen. This brief experience has re-awakened my curiosity about comparative legal systems & trial procedures, from Islamic courts to the Napoleonic Code to English common law. This may be the theme for my next project, after I get through with my current work on cities and architecture in Latin America, which has still a ways to go.

Curious coincidence: Speaking of trial procedure, I've just been invited to submit a small claims case I have pending to the TV show "The People's Court." What a weird idea! I've never seen the show, but I plan to watch today before I reply.

Dependency revisited

Thomas Holloway has posted a useful review of "dependency theory" and its variant, "the development of underdevelopment," the radical paradigm popular for interpreting Latin American problems in the 1960s and 70s. I think his main point is right: "dependency" theory was abandoned not because it was false, but because the praxis it implied led to massive defeats. When reality is so horrible (dirty wars and death camps included), but seems immutable, some people just try to learn to live with it and focus energies on policies that do seem realizable -- meaning, in Latin America, cooperating with the hegemon instead of opposing it.

And yet, Cuba has continued to resist re-absorption into the system, and a whole string of countries in South America (Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and, more tentatively, their other neighbors) are working to redefine the relationship with the U.S. and other capitalist powers. "Neo-liberalism" doesn't explain these developments; "dependency" does better, but its Dos Santos-Frank-Cardoso expressions were pre-globalization (and pre-Porto Alegre, etc.), so need to be updated. What seems to be emerging is a post-dependency theory that does not yet have a name.

The thrill of poverty

For everybody but the poor, that is. Lively discussion of global slumming going on right now on the list of Latin American historians. Here's an example from Buenos Aires. I guess there's nothing new about the phenomenon. It was called "slumming" when the New York downtowners would go up to Harlem in the 1920s. And I imagine that well-to-do Romans, looking for a frisson, must have done the same thing back in the days of the Republic. Still, it's always interesting when somebody from the slums is slick and quick enough to take advantage of the bourgeois' curiosity to make a buck.

Geoff Fox

What we're up to

My friend and colleague Mark Engler (see his website Democracy Uprising for links to his many articles) just asked where we were these days. Here's the story:

We just got back to New York last week. We plan to remain here until May, when we need to be back to Carboneras, where Susana & I are building our future castle in Spain. Then back to the US in July, Argentina in August and Caracas & Mexico in September, Spain again in October & November. Kind of hectic. The trips to South America & Mexico are for our book. I actually managed to complete a chapter while we were in Spain -- well, nearly complete it; I couldn't very well do final revisions until I got home and could make print-outs. Now that chapter, "The Sacred Urbanism of the Maya," is done, and I'm on to working on the built environment in the pre-Hispanic Andes.

Now it turns out we will have to schedule another trip, to Berlin. Susana's work on memorials (Susana Torre, "Constructing Memorials" in Enwezor, Okwui et al. eds. Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation, Documenta 11, Platform 2, Hatje Cantz 2002, pp. 343-360; see also her Architectural League presentation regarding the NYC 9/11 memorial) has attracted serious attention. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had her people call her when she was in New York last fall; she had read the essay, and wanted to meet with her regarding the memorial to the disappeared they're planning for the old ESMA torture center. And yesterday some folks in Berlin called to invite her to a conference, comparing the "memorial" issue in Germany & Argentina.

Meanwhile, we've got ourselves pretty nicely integrated into Carboneras & environs. We've got as many friends there now as we do here, and (after some effort) I've got better at approximating the local way of speaking (though, if I'm not careful, people still take me for Argentinean). To keep in touch with those folks, I just inaugurated a Spanish-language blog, Lecturas y Lectores, but I don't think anybody has discovered it yet (they're not big Internet users).

I'm not even trying to do journalism these days. It's just LAU (Latin American Architecture and Urbanism, the book we're doing for Norton), completing the revision of my novel in odd moments (e.g., between LAU chapters), and advancing the Spanish project, which is a whole new adventure, in land development. Four houses and four apartments (3 substantial and one tiny, for temporary guests), right "front line" on the sea.

Testing

I'm trying to get used to this new template. Let me see if the "comments" function is enabled, as it's supposed to be.