weatherunderground.com

The wind outside tears down trees: A Nor'easter in late May. My body's been cold for days. I wonder why I moved to the Northeast in the first place. I fret daily over the weather; I've become my grandfather, my mother. Unlike them I don't listen to the doppler report on AM radio or flip though the weather channel during every commercial. No, I am of another generation: I hit refresh on weatherunderground.com obsessively (as if that will make the forecast change). I do it out of hope.

I hope and I hope and I hope.

I hope for warm sunny days in the spring; for heavy thunderstorms on hot summer afternoons; for fallen crisp colored leaves in the fall; for diamonds sparkling on the dark brown tree limbs in winter.

I hope for revolution; for a world where we can all realize ourselves as complete human beings; for a society based on need and desire, rather than the selfish greed of profit. But at least with this, despite the almost certain impossibility of something of the sort occurring in this county in my lifetime, at least there's something I can do about it: organize, organize, organize.

There's nothing I can do about the weather, and I'm running out of hope.

my history in books (abridged)

Courtesey of nedfox

1 Total number of books in your house:
234, broken down as follows - 1/3 social science (political theory, history, communist propaganda, etc.); 1/3 fiction; 1/6 poetry; 1/6 miscellaneous (cookbooks, travel guides, Our Bodies Ourselves, 501 Spanish verbs, sex books, how-to books--including, how to fish, grow house plants, cure things with herbs and vitamins-- etc.).

There's other stuff like biographies and plays that I forgot to account for, but you get the idea.


2 The last book you bought was:
I bought three books at the same time in preparation for a vacation by the beach with my parents*: 1) Daughter of Fortune, Isabel Allende; 2) Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe; 3) Wrenched of the Earth, Franz Fanon.

*Please note that a vacation at the beach with my parents isn't my choice vacation, in fact, I haven't done such a thing since I was in high school. Don't get me wrong, my parents are absolutely wonderful and great drinking buddies, but I prefer and usually end up wandering around Latin America in a "chicken bus" or canoeing/hiking through the backwoods up North. Yet, circumstances led me to the beach.


3 The last book you finished was:
Things Fall Apart by Achebe. I recommend it. That said, I read Anthills of the Savannah years ago, and I have to say, I liked it better. Perhaps it's just that it has a modern political (anti-imperialist) undercurrent , which I'm partial too. Though, while Things Fall Apart is set during an earlier historical moment (beginning at the moment before the English imperial forces penetrated Ghana; ending as the Christian tentacles inject villages with a social plague), it certainly has an embryonic anti-colonial flare.

In 2005, I've also read (in no particular order):
Daughter of Fortune, Isabel Allende
A Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
Kissing in Manhattan, David Schickler
Me Talk Pretty Some Day, David Sedaris
The Laments, George Hagen
and most of McSweeney’s no. 14.

Books that have been staring at me from my bed-side table for ages:
Satanic Verses, Salmon Rushdie ( I made it 1/4th of the way through on a plane flight, then didn't pick it back up until several weeks later when I was left utterly confused. I've tried multiple times since, but am slowly coming to the conclusion that it is not a good read-for-a-half-hour-before-bed book, but rather needs extensive coffee shop/under a tree time, which I don't have at the moment. Maybe I should return it to the book shelf until my next substantial urban--I don't think it's a good read-in-the-woods book--vacation).
Autobiography of Mother Jones
The CIO's Left-Led Unions, ed. Steve Rosswurm


4 Five books you often read or that mean a lot to you:
Soooo many... There are many categories of meant a lot.

There's those books that have greatly shaped my political development. I would include these as a start:
The Marx-Engels Reader (I know it's lame to list a collection as meaningful book, but otherwise, I'd have to list ten or so individual texts and that's not that interesting, either).
The Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci
Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey
Classes, Erik Olin Wright

Those that have changed my understanding of what literature is, and what an author is able to accomplish:
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Those that have inspired me as a poet/communist (note, the small "c"):
Canto General, Pablo Neruda

Those that I happened to read at the exact moment that I needed them, and were thus transformed into catalysts for deep personal change:
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing (read in 2001)
Damian, Hermann Hesse (read somewhere around 1996 )

Then, there are those that are just all around fantastic books. There's lots of those, too many to name (e.g.: Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison; 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marques).


5 Who you're going to pass this along to and why:
I'm going to have to get back to you on that one.