In this self-tagging meme, which I invented before discovering that others had already done so, you name fifteen books, not just writers, which have inspired or influenced you. These are not necessarily the books you most liked, but the books that shaped you. I am listing books that shaped me as a person and character, not that shaped me as an intellectual or as a writer.You who read are tagged, if you so wish.
1. Adiós Muchachos. This is the Zero blog, so we need a book related to Sandino and the Central American revolutions. Sergio Ramírez’ memoir is an excellent introduction. It is also connected to our Popol Vuh theme. The first chapter, “Como los santos,” points out how a Catholic education prepared the guerrillas for the monkish underground life and also to stand up to torture. They were all great sacrificers and penitents.
2. Alice in Wonderland. She, too, was polite to insane people in positions of authority, and she got all the way across the chess board.
3. Altazor. My excellent introduction to language and poetry.
4. Art of Loving. I read this book in elementary school. Erich Fromm was an adult and very far ahead of Reeducation.
5. Go Tell It on the Mountain. As I said in a comments thread somewhere, this book is all depth, no histrionics. It blew me away because of the emotional depth and the precision. I became a serious person then.
6. Masters and the Slaves. Wherein Gilberto Freyre really irritates me. I am still not over my first flashes of anger at the self serving nature and supercilious tone of this book. That is why I write so many papers on it.
7. Now We Are Six. Wherein A. A. Milne affirms kid power. You can enjoy your life! said this book to me when I read it. Victory.
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude. This book caused me to go into Latin American Studies.
9. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Paulo Freire’s classic is another theme book of this blog, so I must list it. I recognized the truth in it as I also did when I read Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (which I would list if the theme of this meme were 15 Books You Found Epoch Making).
10. Poemas humanos (as it was called then). Vallejo’s Parisian poetry. The deepest thing I had read since Baldwin.
11. Popol Vuh. This is, of course, the book I am performing now. It is the most important book. In it we are both serious and new, and we chant poems before dawn. We are more intelligent that 1-Death and 7-Death, because we are ball players.
12. Romance de Lobos. It was in my parents’ house and I did not know what it was. The title suggested to me that there were other universes available, so I decided I would learn to read this book. I have not yet actually read it, but it is one of my major influences nonetheless.
13. Satanism and Witchcraft. Jules Michelet’s classic was the first research / interpretive book I ever read. It convinced me that I should also be a researcher.
14. Story of the Amulet. A magical talking fairy from a pet store, the British Museum, the poor learned gentleman, solidarity among children, worryingly absent parents, stale houses smelling of mutton, and travel through space-time to the ancient world. My first travel book. Superior to Pan’s Labyrinth. Fanciful like the Rose Fairy Book, which was also important to me at this time, and a good (if insufficient) antidote to the dark tales of Hans Christian Andersen which, in my view, should never be given to girls. (I would list H. C. Andersen as a major negative influence if this were a meme about individual texts, but it is about whole books. I will say that stories like “The Little Mermaid” and “The Wild Swans” should be banished from the face of the Earth, or at least rated R.)
15. Zen Buddhism. D. Suzuki’s classic, which I read as a child. If you have the chance to read this when young and then look out at the fog wafting through the Monterey pines, over the Chinese rock, and hear ships’ horns, and gaze out at a broad ocean, you can grow deep. And the Zen mind is a beginner’s mind. And philosophical thinking is radical thinking. Radical thinking comes from the roots. Professor Zero thinks from the ground up.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
One of the books that defined me.
It had to do with the changing of the guards between the old ways, defined by horses, and the new ways, defined by aeroplanes. A quick squiz through the pages of the book, at that url I posted above, also reveals a gender dynamic that I had not consciously recorded before. The changing of the guard remains masculine, defined by the girl protagonist’s brothers, perhaps, not be her. Perhaps it was the repression of feminine directness and sexual dynamics that gave the horses and the planes a mystical aura for me.
I’d like to hear more on that last sentence sometime.
I think it has a lot to do with traditional cultures and why people feel very attached to their environments of upbringing. It may be a difference between white memoirs of Africa and black memoirs of the same place. The sexual repression means that eros is diffused into the environment, so that one’s relationship is primarily with the environment, and only secondarily with human beings. It’s one of the aspects that I found most difficult to convey within my own work. I think it’s why such memoirs are read, and what also turns a lot of those who haven’t experienced the relationship towards a semi-abusive mode of relating: “Sigh! We don’t want to hear another white African’s memoir.” There is the sense of something rarified and special in the way that the environment is featured, and those whose predominant mode of thinking/reacting is ego psychology tend to misattribute that sense of specialness to the individual conceit of the author. This leads to a fundamental misreading. It is the asceticism towards other human beings and towards culture that gives the environment its mysterious, seductive allure, and enables those brought up in such a context to form profound relationships with it.
Flambards is a British story, set at the turn of the century prior to world war 1. Yet it also conveys that ascetic mode.
This is very interesting. I have that relationship to the California / western landscapes and it isn’t uncommon. The reason I like New Orleans is that it allows itself to be related to in that way. It is that displacement of ego that I like.
It must be possible to have that kind of relationship with the environment in a lot of places, especially rural settings. The Australian environment tends to discourage this attitude because of its genuine harshness, and the social context in which white settlers were inducted here, and the limited amount of time that whites have been here. They are also very tenuous in their relationship to the land because of a guilty conscience, which causes them to sequester themselves into sterile suburban environments.
What you describe seems to me to happen in a lot of the U.S., especially the East and South, although I am a foreigner in these parts.
Interestingly, I suspect Barack Obama has that ego displacement due to landscape. It’s in the way he looks at the ocean from Hawaii!
What you describe seems to me to happen in a lot of the U.S., especially the East and South, although I am a foreigner in these parts.
It’s what I would consider to be culturally normal. A large amount of my feeling of exile is in dealing with people who do not have this kind of sacred relationship with their environment. Mike grew up in that way, although his feeling for the environment he grew up in may be relatively muted by now. Relating from the purer perspective of ego, as if one carried around one’s identity in a jar, is what I cannot fathom. It is one of the reasons why identity politics seems so inimical to my state of mind. But, I think you may be right about Obama. He doesn’t seem to fantasise very much about who he is and his raison d’etre — not like Bush.
Fantasizing about who he is, that’s key. It’s late and I’m exhausted but … I am flashing on the fact that I influence people without trying, which is why some people accuse me of having “manipulated” when all I really did was make a suggestion to which a majority freely agreed. I remember once getting together, in the East, with professor friends who all worked there. They were all engaged in fantasising about who they were (and from there deducing what they should do next), and I, the least famous and successful of the group, was saying nothing about who I was, but making a few quiet comments about what might be done … that people were listening to. Someone asked, “Why does everyone listen so intently to what Z says?” Someone answered, “Because she takes no authority, and is thus the *place* of authority.” It was quite interesting and I am convinced it has something to do with having stared so many hours out at that ego dissolving Pacific.
I think it is the key to inner strength — not to presume to take authority. This way, I find there are some situations in which I have no authority, and ought not to waste any more my time. In other situations I have a natural influence, but it is not forced, and I do not need to make a monumental effort. Those who fantasise about who they are lose their connection with their inner resources and become fragile. Shamanic strength comes from the shadow that the moon and those factors associated with femininity cast upon the sun (egoism and free will). (Cf. Bataille’s “solar anus”.) To embrace one’s limitations is to no longer have to make the insuperable effort to rise above them in self perfection — is to remove them as a focus from one’s life. One actually becomes stronger by this means.
***Those who fantasise about who they are lose their connection with their inner resources and become fragile.***
There’s wisdom in that comment (and this discussion). I’m putting *Adios Muchachos* on my list of books to read.
Thank you both.:)
I echo Natasha’s quotation. YES.
And this is why one of my department chairs hates me, by the way, as I now comprehend. Having inevitable influence but not wanting power over others, and standing for sanity, not for “control.” If you have influence, says he, it must be because you took it by force and that you intend to use it in a self serving way. (I am repeatedly told I should feel sorry for him and his, but I cannot muster more than indifference; I feel sorry for the unemployed, the refugees, and so on.)
Fantasizing about who you are. My main X does it and he hates this blog because he says that in it I appear to be more intelligent than I actually am. The chair mentioned above has said the same thing. My parents fantasize about who they are, it seems: it is the conversation they drink so as to have.
I have a colleague who does the same thing, in grandiose ways reminiscent of my X.
In Reeducation if you were successful, pleased, or tranquil in any way it was assumed that this was a result of fantasizing about who you were. You had to tear yourself down, which I said was a form of fantasizing about who you were, and I really scandalized people by saying this, they were so hurt.
Thumbs up on Now We Are Six. I’m also a lover of When We Were Young, because…
The King said,
“Butter, eh?”
And bounced out of bed.
“Nobody,” he said,
As he kissed her
Tenderly,
“Nobody,” he said,
As he slid down the banisters,
“Nobody,
My darling,
Could call me
A fussy man –
BUT
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!”
Were I to be granted wishes, I’d want to be able to write nonsense like that.
Hi, CV, and yes! And looking back for this title has made me realize this post is not in alphabetical order. I am about to fix that.
In Reeducation if you were successful, pleased, or tranquil in any way it was assumed that this was a result of fantasizing about who you were. You had to tear yourself down, which I said was a form of fantasizing about who you were, and I really scandalized people by saying this, they were so hurt.
People who believe/think in this way are also those who believe that truth/reality is unattainable. What scandalises them is the idea you are unassumingly representing, which is that there is more to reality than ideology — in fact that there is a reality counterposed to ideological thinking. This is a very old-fashioned idea, which cuts against the grain of contemporary mores and beliefs, such as “name it and claim it” and the feeling that the individual is the centre of the universe and deserves everything to fall in line with his or her immediate desires, or else.
You represent that there is an objective universe outside of this self-indulgent (and destructive) mode of solipsistic subjectivity.
That makes people feel bad.