Month: April 2013

One of my least admirable qualities, according to my wife, is that I quit books. She will read a book that she detests all the way until the last page just because she started it. She doesn’t quit books. I, on the other hand, am convinced that there are millions of great books out there that I haven’t read and I’m not about to waste my finite time on a book that isn’t great — whether I’m two pages into it or two hundred, I’m fine with cutting my losses at any point.

When some years back I quit in the middle of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible, it was the worst literary failure that my wife had ever seen of me. She still brings it up. She loved the story of the missionary family in the Congo, and she had been the one to hopefully recommend the book to me, and then I only got halfway through it.

But all’s not lost with me and Kingsolver. Though I won’t be returning to what the novelist has to say about missionaries in Africa, I find her thoughts on biology and rural living perspicacious. In an essay she wrote called “The Good Farmer,” she says this:

“In my professional life I’ve learned that as long as I write novels and nonfiction books about strictly human conventions and constructions, I’m taken seriously. But when my writing strays into that muddy territory where humans are forced to own up to our dependence on the land, I’m apt to be declared quaintly irrelevant by the small, acutely urban clique that decides in this country what will be called worthy literature. (That clique does not, fortunately, hold much sway over what people actually read.) I understand their purview, I think. I realize I’m beholden to people working in urban centers for many things I love: They publish books, invent theater, produce films and music. But if I had not been raised such a polite Southern girl, I’d offer these critics a blunt proposition: I’ll go a week without attending a movie or concert, you go a week without eating food, and at the end of it we’ll sit down together and renegotiate ‘quaintly irrelevant.’”

by

It caught my eye as it ran across the CNN ticker: “Madonna, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, and Bono are some of the celebs pledging to ‘save Africa.’ But does Africa want them?”

I was on my way to teach a class, so as I continued down the hall I thought about it. Good question . . . does Africa want them? But it can’t be answered. Africa doesn’t even know they exist.

Once while I was living in Ts’oeneng, I think it was in 2006, Bono came to Lesotho. He visited the capital on a Saturday and I happened to travel from Ts’oeneng to there the next day, where I ran into an American friend who told me about it. She was working in Maseru for a non-governmental organization and she giddily told me all about the event the night before where Bono had spoken about the local textile factories and AIDS. She showed me photos on her cellphone. There he was on the stage at Lesotho’s most expensive hotel wearing his signature extra-terrestrial sunglasses (is that what they are?)

Wow, so Bono had visited little Lesotho. He came and went and I would have never known. I guess out in the villages we don’t get a lot of news. But then I wondered if his visit counted as news in Ts’oeneng.

On Monday, I asked my Form E class — the oldest and most world-wise class of students at Ngoana Jesu Secondary School, “Did you know that Bono was in Maseru over the weekend?”

“Pardon, sir.”

“Did any of you guys hear that Bono, the singer of the music group U2, was in Maseru this past weekend?”

“Sir?”

Not that my students were totally unfamiliar with Western celebrities. One student had written “Snoop Dogg” on his backpack, and I had been asked a number of times if I liked Celine Dion.

But that’s just it: Snoop Dogg and Celine Dion. Which Western celebrities were also known in Lesotho was curious and never predictable. Dolly Parton was played frequently on the radios of public buses, along with R.Kelly. Soccer is the most popular sport, so people knew the British player David Beckham, but the only other athletes we knew in common were professional wrestlers. They loved John Cena.

No one I met knew Madonna, or Angelina Jolie — and once I showed students a magazine photo of her husband Brad Pitt, to which they made no connection either. Sorry, George Clooney. You, too, don’t translate.

And sorry, Bono. While you’re flying in and spending a few hours saving Africa, Africa is wondering who you are.

by

Have you ever thought of Goodreads bookshelves as a window into your mind?

Do you do Goodreads? I’ve found that it can be a useful place for discovering new authors who write in genres you like. And you can keep track of authors you already read. For example, when I heard the other day that Michael Pollan was almost due to release a new title, Cooked, I put it on my Goodreads “to-read” shelf. I suppose it’s like an Amazon wish list, except only for books.

Only it just occurred to me that my Goodreads shelves are open for public viewing and, in a way, they feel more revealing than a hundred Facebook photos. You can shelve books you’ve already read, which you can rate as well, and even review if you want to, and you can shelve books you want to read, like I did with Pollan’s Cooked. And then someone can come along and look through your shelves. It’s like giving them a look into your brain, for on those shelves are the ideas, the knowledge that you’ve consumed.

Or at least they are the ideas, the knowledge that you claim to have consumed.

by