Books: My anti-drug.

I feel this blog may become more book-oriented than Lacan-oriented, because I'm a total bibliophile lately, but I think I'm okay with that.

I just finished Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which gave me more nightmares than any book I've read to date. I dreamed about being in the dark hold of the ship, scared and sick. That part of the book horrified me the most. I knew that Kunta Kinte was going to be kidnapped, but the first 150 pages detailing his life in Africa sort of lulled me into a false sense of security. Then out of nowhere he gets beaten and chained and taken to America, never to see his family again.

I'm sure anything I could say about Roots has been said before, but nevertheless, I have now read it. It didn't tell me anything I hadn't learned before in history classes, but it definitely made it more real.

I wanted to get into some Dickens, whom I've never read before, but after Roots I can't bring myself to read white literature right away. So I decided to read Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, which is a novel written by a 16 year old Haitian girl. It caught my eye at Barnes and Noble, for two reasons. One, because it was in the Oprah's Book Club section, which I'm not ashamed to admit liking. Oprah chooses good books, damn it. I read many of them before they were picked by her (The Good Earth, East of Eden, Anna Karenina, to name a few), and consider most of her picks to be really worthwhile works of literature. I gotta respect anyone who can get Midwestern housewives to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison.

Anyway, the second reason it caught my eye was because it was about Haiti. I've been following this blog about a rescue center in Haiti, which takes in babies and children who are sick, malnourished or injured, and provides care until they are well enough to go home. The pictures of children with kwashiorkor are particularly disturbing, with their swollen faces and legs and empty eyes. It stuns me to see toddlers much older than Téa that weigh far less. If I had money to donate to the rescue center, I would.

Despite having only barely started reading the new book, I had a dream about it (sort of) last night. I dreamed I was in, not Haiti, but Jamaica, and I was being given a tour of this wealthy white person's apartment, which was on the top floor of a really rickety old building, the bottom floors of which were occupied by native Jamaicans. The wealthy apartment was really beautiful, but the building had such a bad foundation that it wasn't level; the whole building listed to one side. I was thinking that it was a great apartment, but I'd be afraid to live in it; the building seemed like it was just about to topple over.

I'm sure that means something, but I haven't felt like interpreting dreams lately.

I should really write more often. It's difficult to find that time when three things miraculously align: I feel like writing, I have something to write about, and I have time to do it. I'd blame the baby, but who am I kidding? It's always been like this! I guess I'd rather have the missing factor be "time to do it" rather than "something to write about." So often in college I'd feel like writing for myself and have all the free time in the world, but my mind was a blank.