A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, January 5, 2008

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas

Well, it's the twelfth day of Christmas, and as soon as I can get the twelve drummers drumming out of the house, the holiday season is officially over. Actually, for us it ended on New Year's Day, when we took down the decorations and put the tree -- I bought a little potted fir this year -- outside. And yesterday, I drove my brother-in-law to the airport in a driving rainstorm. So it's all back to normal.

Well, as normal as anything is in an election year. I have to admit that the enthusiasm for Obama in Iowa is contagious. And now I read that he's leading Hillary by twelve points in the New Hampshire polls. I still think Hillary's experience would make her the more effective president, but I've got nothing against Obama. The symbolism alone makes me happy -- that of a black man as the leader of the United States, a country that was conceived in liberty for everyone who was a white man, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, except for black slaves, who were counted as only three-fifths equal and then only for purposes of apportioning representatives.


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