!Summer reading
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agk's diary
21 July 2023 @ 16:10 UTC
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written on GPD Win 1 on Model M keyboard
at roommate's writing desk
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The box fan rumbles. It exhausts hot air out the
window over the driveway, draws cooler air from the
shady backyard. Low tones of grandpa's voice from
first daughter's room, a 35-year-old cassette tape
reading her fairy stories and nursery rhymes he
once read me: Snow White and Rose Red, Jack and the
Beanstalk. The timbre of his voice slowly changes.
Tape degrades at naptime and bedtime. One day the
stories will be unintelligible.
Yesterday we biked to the library for toddler time
and books, Bugz' house for a book, creek on the way
home. Daughter slipped on slick wet slate, fell---
splash!, laughed, slipped carefully to low water-
fall wet and muddy. To minnows holding formation in
a dapple of sun she said "Hi fishes I love you!" I
started Adolph Reed's new book The South.
Books for summer reading in this diary entry are in
two categories: true adventures, 1930s anarchist/
communist fiction.
1930s proletarian fiction
-------------------------
B. Traven (1934) The Death Ship [(1926) Das Toten-
schiff]
Written in English, first published in German.
Narrator's a sailor purportedly from New Orleans
stranded in Antwerp, deported around Europe after
WWI. While shipboard, nationality papers became
essential. He left his on a ship that sailed.
He signs to a coffin ship, so decrepit it's worth
more in insurance payout than afloat. Labor cond-
itions are hell; the crew without papers can't
leave. All know one day the ship will sink & they
will die. The writing's sharp, clever, humane;
adventure tense and expansive. Such ships still
exist.
Fielding Burke [Olive Tilford Dargan] (1932) Call
Home the Heart
I finished Das Totenschiff a few days ago, just
started this proletarian novel. Its Kentucky
writer was moved by the 1929 Loray Mills strike
in Gastonia, North Carolina, and made fiction of
it. A bright young girl's ground down by the
demands of maintaining her big destitute mountain
family. Everything sucks so she heads to the
textile mills. I'm here for this.
Lynd Ward (1932) Wild Pilgrimmage; (1937) Vertigo
I flipped through these 'novels without words'
(composed entirely of woodcuts) over the five
years since Nancy gave them to me. This summer I
'read' them to first daughter, speaking my inter-
pretation of the pictures with words. They became
deeper, richer, more tragic.
Wild Pilgrimmage follows a guy who, fed up with
the factory, roams. Many men roamed at the time.
He worked on farms, slept in hay, misused a woman
and moved on. The red woodblock prints are his
inner life, black his objective life.
Vertigo's complex. Ward represented impersonal
social forces that led to and resulted from the
depression. We follow the intertwined stories of
a girl who plays violin and the elderly gentleman
whose insurance company employed her husband.
There are strikes and breadlines, a suicide
attempt and refusal to scab, Pinkertons and board
meetings, the search for work and for profit.
True adventures
---------------
Alan Weisman (1997), Gaviotas a village to reinvent
world
Gaviotas ecovillage was established by Colombian
engineers in los llanos (harsh savannah across
the Andes) in 1971. Their concern was initially
population growth, then energy crisis that led to
the boom in adult cycling, earth day, the first
green tech subsidies. Weisman narrates technical
and social challenges of living and inventing in
the most inhospitable Colombian ecosystem.
The inventions capture sun to heat water, steril-
ize water, cook food; wind and children's energy
to raise water from wells deeper than previously
possible; flowing water's energy to raise water
and generate electricity; muscle power to stabil-
ize banks, compress earth, grind cassava; mycelia
to grow rainforest in los llanos.
Gaviotas tech was installed large-scale in cities
and countryside for residential, public, and ind-
ustrial use. They started appropriate technology
movement; survived narcotrafficantes, paramilit-
aries, FARC, and the end of import substitution/
green tech subsidies. Some tech they were contr-
acted to install had to be put in stupid places &
fell apart. They're still there.
Jose Ignacio Lopez Vigil (1994), Rebel Radio: the
story of El Salvador's Radio Venceremos [(1991),
Las mil y una historias de Radio Venceremos, Mark
Fried, trans.]
This fast-paced, white-knuckle story of FMLN's
guerilla pirate radio station was given me by the
woman who got me into amateur radio. I shared it
with my radio-nerd friend Kirsa. It became her
favorite book.
How do you broadcast cultural, news, political
education content during guerilla war against a
US-backed dictator as death squads and an air-
force try to kill you, shut down your signal, and
kill your listeners? Initially with a modified
marine radio lugged into the bush, and constant
movement. It's awesome to watch the struggle to
power the station, deploy and quickly tear down
powerful clandestine antenna setups, escape
targeted aerial strafing and bombing, and stay a
step ahead while making entertaining, ascerbic,
informative, uplifting shows to maintain situat-
ional awareness and morale of the guerillas and
embrace the people.
Ivan Papanin (1939) Life on an Ice Floe [Zhizn' na
l'dine] [^1]
Gaviotas's nerds did heroic deeds in isolated
nearly uninhabitable tropics. Rebel Radio's nerds
did heroic deeds in total war. This is the diary
of a scientist as his team did six months of
hydrology and radio research living on an errat-
ically floating Arctic ice floe in the stinkin'
1930s! Solderpunk turned me onto this one.
The environment's so treacherous, unstable, un-
known, and hard to resupply it might as well be
low earth orbit. The guys don't just survive it,
they do ordinary, slow, physically exhausting
science day after day. And they're sadistic to
the dog, cook with gasoline, move food caches and
tents so they don't sink wetly into the sea,
confront impossibility with curiosity. It's un-
imaginably cool.
These guys are carried by devotion to Stalin,
laid on more heavily in the Russian text than the
English. It made me think about Barefoot Doctors
in the 1968 Chinese Cultural Revolution doing the
impossible (universal primary healthcare practic-
ally overnight for a huge rural long-underdevel-
oped country). Barefoot Doctors were trained to
mix a little Western regular medicine, Classical
Chinese Medicine and folk medicine, and healing
power of Mao-thought when nothing else worked.
Their ideology might look goofy in retrospect,
but is an important part of the story.
I paused halfway through, because I was reading
aloud with Evy's scientist sister amid amazement
and laughter, but she's been busy.
Jonathan Kozol (1978), Children of the Revolution:
a Yankee teacher in the Cuban schools
Kozol, educator from Boston wrote important books
on racial/economic inequality in US education.
This adventure: the 1961 Literacy Campaign. Cuba
decreased illiteracy from 25% to I think 6% in
nine months.
Teachers were mostly teens from cities. They went
out with one primer each, hammock, and lantern to
the countryside and taught with Paolo Friere's
approach, building literacy with what Kozol calls
dangerous words. Literacy meant reading and writ-
ing at second-grade level. The hundreds of thous-
ands who participated in the campaign were endur-
ingly, enormously proud of what they did that
year. Teachers labored all day with learners,
generally in fields; taught before dawn or after
dusk by lantern.
The 1961 campaign was followed by a 1962-1968
campaign to get everyone in the country to a 6th
grade reading level. There's so much excitement
in the air, the world changing at its core. As a
reader I was swept up, skeptical but inspired.
Later in the book, Kozol discussed the '70s Cuban
education system, as if to address my skepticism.
He debated teenagers about what 'freedom' means,
cited UN stats, hoped what Cuba did the US could.
My life-experience leads me to doubt the possibil-
ity of educational revolution without political-
economic one. 'To be a revolutionary doctor,
there must first be a revolution,' Che Guevara
told the first post-revolution class of graduat-
ing Cuban doctors. I imagine same for teachers.
In revolutionary situations, the future's clearly
unwritten. It's unclear what old obligations
remain. For a moment of civic outpouring, every-
thing's possible. Having lived through such times
I love reading exhilirating stories of others'
recollections of unbelievable massive civic out-
pourings, buoyed by pride and faith.
First daughter's awake.
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[1]:Life on an Ice Floe's hard to find. En/Ru www:
tracciabi.li/~whiterabbit/Life_on_an_ice_floe/index
html
