Cien anos de soledad

One of the reasons I've felt weirded out this past week, apart from
too much work and not enough time to do it is that I'm reading 'One-
hundred years of solitude' by the colombian author Gabriel Garcia
Marquez. I tried to start reading it in spanish, but it is so different and
weird that my first reaction was 'fuck, my spanish must really suck, because
I don't have any idea what he's talking about.' So I bought the english
version instead and it really is a fantastic book, in every sense of the word
fantastic. It follows 5 generations of the Buendia family and it rings so
true at the same time that every almost single event that happens in it
is false and magical, the story is told in the past fantastical tense.

Everything that happens could be a later mythical interpretation of past events,
instead of a town being built because a group of young couples are moving
away from their parents after one of the men kills a rival, instead they
leave because the ghost of the dead man is haunting his killer. More things
happen in the first 60 pages of this book than any two other books, it's like
the Anti-tom clancy, instead of 800 pages of nothing followed by 100 pages
of climax, it's several hundred pages of climax.

The book comes out the pages and infects your life so that sentences run
on and become paragraphs, paragraphs blow up into pages and pages fly away
into books, all of which makes it difficult to finish the technical proposals I'm
writing. Cien anos de propuestas technicas.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The other side of Porkbusters, the people who need pork

Here in Alaska the governor is discussing a PR campaign would attempt to tell the rest of the US that Alaska is not just a consumer of Federal money, and it would "tell Alaska's story": (from a column by Beth Bragg) The governor wants to "tell Alaska's story" to the Lower 48 so folks down there have a better idea of what it's like up here. The goal is to end the ridicule we've been so good at inspiring lately, what with our bridges to you-know-where and our desire to drill for oil in a wildlife refuge. The thinking goes like this: If we can educate the critics with pictures of a desolate ANWR and defuse the comedians with pictures of a serene and congenial Ted Stevens, then we can move on to our ultimate goal, which is building bridges to you-know-where and drilling for oil in a wildlife refuge. Or as the Governor actually said: "Alaska does not just take. We give, and we have the capacity to give much, much more -- if permitted to do so,&
Read more

Haditha slant in the press

Image
There's not much actual information out in the press about what really happened in Haditha, but most of what has come out is highly slanted against the marines. The only data point I've seen is an interview with the lance corporal who survived the initial IED explosion. Here's a summary of the interview here: (RHCP) (video here ) Again, here's a summary of the salient facts that Crossan related: 1) The Marines knew there was going to be an attack on the command outpost, which would explain the high degree of suspicion about the Iraqi's in a taxi that first refused to stop, then ran away from them. 2) There was an IED attack on his humvee, and a squad was sent in 3) Insurgents began firing on the Marines almost immediately. 4) He's not claiming to have witnessed anything. The first slant that has already been pointed out in several places (hotair), is in the times online from london, where they grabbed one quote from Corporal Crossan , “were blinded by ha
Read more

Moving on up

I'm changing URL's for this blog, I started to when we moved to colombia, but I never really have time. Please update your links. http://farsouthofi-10.blogspot.com/
Read more