Sunday, June 29, 2008

On This Day Last Year...

I met Ollie and Ruth on the Liemba on Lake Tanganyika and we got on like a house fire so we traveled down through Malawi together. Spending time with them was a fabulous break from traveling alone. We sampled the local alcohol, Shake-Shake, which was about like stomach bile in a milk carton; we rode countless miles on packed buses drinking the local gin.; and we washed our clothes in Lake Malawi. Nothing like two Brits to make the way a bit easier.

They had met years ago while traveling and found that the relationship worked best when they were on the road. They would be home for a while and start to get at one another, then one of them would say, Hey, Let's go travel again. In them, I have a very good reason to visit London.

Below: Some fabulous store fronts, hand painted with God Love.






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E. L. Doctorow's Got a Harpoon.

From The Nation: Doctorow gave a keynote at the April 2007 meeting of American Academy of Arts and Science and the American Philosophical Society titled The White Whale. An excerpt:

Melville in Moby-Dick speaks of reality outracing apprehension. Apprehension in the sense not of fear or disquiet but of understanding... reality as too much for us to take in, as, for example, the white whale is too much for the Pequod and its captain. It may be that our new century is an awesomely complex white whale--scientifically in our quantumized wave particles and the manipulable stem cells of our biology, ecologically in our planetary crises of nature, technologically in our humanoid molecular computers, sexually in the rising number of our genders, intellectually in the paradoxes of our texts, and so on.

What is more natural than to rely on the saving powers of simplism? Perhaps with our dismal public conduct, so shot through with piety, we are actually engaged in a genetic engineering venture that will make a slower, dumber, more sluggish whale, one that can be harpooned and flensed, tried and boiled to light our candles. A kind of water wonderworld whale made of racism, nativism, cultural illiteracy, fundamentalist fantasy and the righteous priorities of wealth.

The entire keynote.