I’m Franziska, and I really like to read. Consider following me/liking/rebloging this post if you also like books (I will probably follow you back).

I will mostly be posting quotes from whatever I’m reading, but I may also rant about literature from time to time.

Some of my favorite works are:

Desert Solitaire (Edward Abbey)

Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)

The Monkey Wrench Gang (Edward Abbey)

Dune (Frank Herbert)

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (JRR Tolkien)

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (Roger Williams)

Ceremony (Leslie Marmon Silko)

Dracula (Bram Stoker)

Hamlet (William Shakespeare)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)

Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse)

Current Reads: Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert)

Goodreads

Leslie Marmon Silko, from Gardens in the Dunes

"Stealing from the “government”? What “government” was that? Mexico City? Zeta had laughed out loud. Washington, D.C.? How could one steal if the government itself was the worst thief? There was not, and there never had been, a legal government by Europeans anywhere in the Americas. Not by any definition, not even by the Europeans’ own definitions and laws. Because no legal government could be established on stolen land. Because stolen land never had clear title. All the laws of the illicit governments had to be blasted away. Every waking hour Zeta spent scheming and planning to break as many of their laws as she could. War had been declared the first day the Spaniards set foot on Native American soil, and the same war had been going on ever since: the war was for the continents called the Americas." -Leslie Marmon Silko

Taos :: Geraint Smith

* * * *

"Stealing from the “government”? What “government” was that? Mexico City? Zeta had laughed out loud. Washington, D.C.? How could one steal if the government itself was the worst thief?

There was not, and there never had been, a legal government by Europeans anywhere in the Americas. Not by any definition, not even by the Europeans’ own definitions and laws. Because no legal government could be established on stolen land. Because stolen land never had clear title. All the laws of the illicit governments had to be blasted away. Every waking hour Zeta spent scheming and planning to break as many of their laws as she could.

War had been declared the first day the Spaniards set foot on Native American soil, and the same war had been going on ever since: the war was for the continents called the Americas."

-Leslie Marmon Silko

[Thanks to Edward Smith]

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

Now, I'm going to be honest, I read this for school. And typically a lot of people don't like books they were forced to read. Especially when it comes to school.

Rating: 5/10

Initial Thoughts: It's an ok story. It has some decent messaging and the symbolism in how it's written isn't lost on me. But the structure leaves more to be desired. At least for me. It has walls of text and is mostly description based rather than dialogue. And while that's fine, that tends to leave walls to walls of text that just left me bothered, confused, and double backing. That's ignoring the fact that the story is non-linear in nature and there are no chapters.

Time to read: 2 months

Recommended for: Fans of Native American Literature, fans of heavy description in books, and people who enjoy realistic stories.

Not Recommended for: People who can't visualize, fantasy fans, people with dyslexia(I get most books are bad for dyslexia but this one is egregiously bad) and people who prefer a linear timeline for their stories.

Spoilers ahead-

Overview: The story follows Tayo, a half whit half native american man heavily traumatized after his time in WWII. The story doesn't follow a linear path, focusing on the past and present leaving them jumbled and unable to be deciphered half the time on initial read. As the story goes on Tayo begins to heal and the story begins to get less and less jumbled as a result, but due to that the walls of text tend to get longer and longer. Often the story is interjected with mini stories meant to expand upon the world and explain Tayo's ancestory and his history with the stories.

Analysis: This story is full of imagery and description. It focuses heavily on Tayo's mixed nature as he struggles to come to terms with himself and his faith as he is a combination of contrasting ethnicities. And while the plot twist at the end of Emo killing all of Tayo's old war buddies most likely represents what happens to people who don't ever bother to heal, I can't help but just not like the book. Nothing wrong with it in theory, I just found it very boring and left skimming the details more often than not.

Arcane character bingo!!!

Leslie Marmon Silko, from "Tribal Councils: Puppets of the U. S. Government."

"All places and all beings of the earth are sacred. It is dangerous to designate some places sacred when all are sacred. Such compromises imply that there is a hierarchy of value, with some places and some living beings not as important as others. No part of the earth is expendable; the earth is a whole that cannot be fragmented, as it has been by the destroyers' mentality of the industrial age. The greedy destroyers of life and bringers of suffering demand that sacred land be sacrificed so that a few designated sacred places may survive; but once any part is deemed expendable, others can easily be redefined to fit the category of expendable. As Ruth Rudner points out in her article, "Sacred Land," what spiritual replenishment is possible if one must travel through ghastly fumes and ravaged lands to reach the little island or ocean or mountain that has been preserved by the label sacred land?

There can be no compromises with these serial killers of life [the U.S. Government] on earth because they are so sick they can't stop themselves. They would like the rest of us to embrace death as they have, to say, "Well, all this is dead already, what will it matter if they are permitted to kill a little more?" Even among the conservation groups there is an unfortunate value system in place that writes off or sacrifices some locations because they are no longer "virgin". Those who claim to love and protect the Mother Earth have to love all of her, even the places that are no longer pristine. Ma ah shra true ee, the giant serpent messenger, chose the edge of the uranium mining tailings at Jackpile Mine for his reappearance; he was making this point when he chose that unlikely location. The land has not been desecrated; human beings desecrate only themselves.

The Mother Earth is inviolable."

actually i am so obsessed with how gritty 20th century literature is. especially american 20th century literature.

One more video from the same channel, on the "Who follows Cormac McCarthy?" question.

(Sometimes formulated as the "Who follows Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison?" question—an uneasy literary truce in the culture war, where conservative white men and radical women of color each get a representative great novelist, thus missing the radicalism of McCarthy and the conservatism of Morrison. Philip Roth seems to have been forgotten entirely. But I digress.)

Of our YouTuber's candidates, I fully endorse DeLillo and Ishiguro, two of my all-time favorites, never mind "living."

(With a gun to my head, I might even choose DeLillo over McCarthy and Morrison, despite the potential Italian-American identity politics involved. Or at least, in those three oeuvres, of which DeLillo's is admittedly the most uneven, the single book I'd choose for the proverbial desert island is probably Underworld.)

I agree that Erdrich and Silko are in the running, especially for those interested in McCarthy's own subject matter and regional commitments, even if I have quarreled with Silko's politics and sometimes found Erdrich a bit, well, middlebrow. Except for the visionary Housekeeping, written before her puritan turn, I dislike the preachy Marilynne Robinson.

I've never read a word of James Ellroy; please let me know if I must. For other "genre" candidates—I dabble in science fiction and comics, not crime fiction—one might propose Samuel R. Delany or Alan Moore. I read one book of Murakami's, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, sometimes acclaimed his masterpiece; I liked it, didn't love it, and it did not and would not occur to me to rate him above DeLillo.

Our YouTuber flippantly dismisses Joyce Carol Oates. I've advanced only inches into her vast oeuvre—a handful of short stories and essays, one book on writing, two short novels, one long novel—but it was enough to convince me that she's serious, her admittedly discrediting late turn to the genre of the Twitter shitpost notwithstanding. His dismissal of Stephen King may go without saying; I hate George Saunders; I agree that Franzen, along with David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, and even to some extent Louise Erdrich, failed to follow through on their early promise.

I insist on the inclusion of Cynthia Ozick, not least because she does something like Marilynne Robinson's project right, with a much fuller, more anguished, and more properly abrasive acknowledgement of what happens in the soul of the believer-artist when an iconoclastic faith confronts the artistic imagination. Now 95, she released her most recent novel at age 93; I thought it was excellent. I concede, though, that it's probably her body of work as a whole—encompassing essays, stories, and novels, and possibly giving essays and stories pride of place—that is great rather than any one novel, great as some of her novels (The Cannibal Galaxy, Foreign Bodies) are.

(For at least one essay of my own, and often multiple essays, on every writer named above save Ellroy, please see the REVIEW INDEX on my main site.)

All of these writers are elderly or near enough—the youngest are in their 60s—and greatness is perhaps not stirring as obviously as we'd like in the under-60 set. It's harder to identify, though, due to the diminution of mainstream publishing, the proliferation of self-published work, and everything's having moved online. The novel isn't dead, but it is elsewhere. Some of us are doing what we can, and I concede I am probably too immersed in my own vision to judge adequately my more exact contemporaries.

Quote of the Day - November 15, 2022

Quote of the Day – November 15, 2022

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Title: Ceremony | Author: Leslie Marmon Silko | Publisher: Penguin (2007)

“In Cold Storm Light” by Leslie Marmon Silko from Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by American Indians

"What Sterling knew about the Great Depression of 1929 he had learned from his detective and crime magazines. The government boarding-school history teachers had seldom ever got them past the American Civil War. Sterling had been a boy during the Depression, but it had made little or no impression on people at Laguna. Most, especially the old-timers, had said they never even knew a depression was going on, because in those days people had no money in banks to lose. Indians had never held legal title to any Indian reservation land, so there had never been property to mortgage. But winters those years had been mild and wet for the Southwest. Harvests had been plentiful, and the game had been fat for the winter. The Laguna people had heard something about “The Crash.” But they remembered “The Crash” as a year of bounty and plenty for the people." -Leslie Marmon Silko

He had believed that on certain nights, when the moon rose full and wide as a corner of the sky, a person standing on the high sandstone cliff of that mesa could reach the moon.

Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko

Love Poem| Leslie Marmon Silko

-Laguna Pueblo poet Rain smell comes with the wind out of the southwest. Smell of sand dunes tall grass glistening in the rain. Warm raindrops that fall easy (this woman) The summer is born. Smell of her breathing new life small gray toads on damp sand. (this woman) whispering to dark wide leaves white moon blossoms dripping tracks in the sand. Rain smell I am full of hunger deep and longing to…

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