Happy Thursday! Whereas yesterday, I could work outside some of the time because the sun was so gorgeous, today it's overcast and gloomy. I'm so glad that people enjoyed the bean-harvesting post. It's really amazing how much work there always is to do on a farm.
I have a grab-bag of different things to share today.
First, something delicious that I connected with since having to swear off tomatoes:
You can't see it very well (it's really a better shot of my knees, lol) but in the tub is kraut, cucumbers, avocado and some nutritional yeast. With romaine lettuce and my favorite jicama on the side.
I had the same for dinner, but kicked up a notch with the addition of spirulina. I've never been that great a fan of cucumber, but there's something about cucumber chopped up with avocado and lots of spirulina that just hits the delicious spot. I urge you to try it: if you're not a spirulina fan, it might work for you just like it works for this not-cucumber fan!
Next up: a Book Review:
I just finished reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of the Cholera
. I read it when I was in the bathroom, when I was getting my pills together for the day, when I was picking through filberts, getting dressed, brushing my teeth - and sometimes, just laying in bed before going to sleep! That's how I get books read.
. I read it when I was in the bathroom, when I was getting my pills together for the day, when I was picking through filberts, getting dressed, brushing my teeth - and sometimes, just laying in bed before going to sleep! That's how I get books read.
This is a 346-page evocation of a time and place that is so foreign to me - the Caribbean coast of South America at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Marquez evokes so many characters, including many 'bit parts,' with such intimacy and detail, but never even names the city in which the story is set, presuming on the readers' knowledge, or showing that the precise location doesn't really matter, both. I believe it's set in Colombia, but I don't know the city. Many historic innovations are also canvassed - typing, the telegraph, hot air balloons, mailboxes - so that the story is an interesting piece of history at the same time.
It's a slow start, and often ponderously paced, but the development is so inexorably and carefully exposed that the result is fascinating. Reading it as a writer, it is fascinating to see the devices he employs. He uses the 'omniscient narrator's' perspective a lot more than most people do nowadays. He does amazing things with time and the timeline of the story. He focuses in with touchingly intimate, minute details on characters who are not obviously important for the story. For example, the book opens on the scene of the suicide of an otherwise insignificant character that takes place at a very late point in the storyline. The 'main characters' are not even encountered, certainly not in any way that would mark them as the main characters, until the end of the first chapter - and the chapters are long.
This distancing from the main characters and focusing on others really places them in a strong and vivid setting, while the leaping around in the timeline help to build all kinds of anticipation and reflection. The other thing that this does is to underline the aptness of the title itself. The story is really all about 'love,' in its many forms and guises, at this specific time.
It's not a 'put your brain to sleep and ride along' read by any means: you have to do the work with it. And parts of it are not at all uplifting - to the contrary, in fact. But it is extremely well-written and worthwhile. I read it in the version I linked to above: it is clearly a good translation, because I was very seldom bothered by infelicities of translation. There were a very few times where the gender of a pronoun was clearly mistranslated, and a couple of superfluous definite articles, but otherwise, for a 'foreign language book,' it was quite a smooth read.
Some Thoughts on Blogging and Fiction
Having just finished reading a work of fiction, I found myself musing on the value of fiction as a way to experience the world. I have a lot of sympathy with those who say that they get to know more about the world and how they view the world from reading fiction than they do from reading the news or history. That's one of the reasons why I so admire good fiction: in the intimate, private setting in which you find yourself as the reader of a novel, you can try out all sorts of theories and ways to look at the world, and experience empathy or antipathy for all kinds of characters without having to act on it in the 'real world,' and so you have the test-ground to draw some important conclusions.
Phil, who worked as a librarian for years, has a t-shirt that says "Some of my best friends are fictional!"
And then I got to wondering: are friendships that are formed in the blogging world similar to our friendships with fictional characters? How similar is the world of blogging to the world of fiction? For sure, it's more interactive, or can be. And sometimes, you have a blogger meetup or win a giveaway, and a whiff of fairyland wafts into your 'real world.' But otherwise, through reading other people's blogs, you get to eavesdrop on their lives. You get to admire them, envy them, perhaps get your buttons pushed by them - wish you were or were not more like them... You get to identify or disidentify with them in many of the same ways that you do with fictional characters, i.e. without the pressure of immediate, instantaneous interaction. You can turn off the computer and walk away, or shut the book!
Perhaps it's also important that there's no way (short of the meetup context) to verify the truth about the character whose blog you are reading. We put up photos, we aim to be as transparent as we can be (or at least, I do, and I trust that people whose blogs I'm reading do too). So I'm not talking about the scenario where someone's posting a blog pretending to be something quite other than what they are. What I mean is that inevitably, we construct our own image of the person we're reading about and identifying with. And sometimes, they make it as easy for us as they can, with photos galore, and we can still end up with our internal version of the person that will only have a tangential connection to how that person perceives herself.
I think the truth is, all relationships are like that. Some of my closest friends in real life are also fictional: my take on them is only the partial truth. I feel that it's one of the blessings of my relationship with Phil that we often touch base on just this subject and try to make sure that we are seeing each other aright.
So, perhaps it's not just blogging relationships that are like relationships with fictional characters. What do you think? Yes, I'm waxing philosophical... But I'd love to hear your thoughts!
