Nonfiction essays often inspire for me thunderstorms of fleeting thoughts. More like East Coast summer thunderstorms that swirl up suddenly, let loose a downpour, then quickly retreat, the sun shining once again. The thoughts bubble and build and then drift away. If I'm not near a piece of paper, they're gone. Sometimes just sharing the original quote has to make do.
Right now I'm reading "Brown: The Last Discovery of America" by Richard Rodriguez. The ground he covers in this book is amazing. He is Hispanic although I think he laughes at the word and credits Richard Nixon as his "godfather" because in 1971, Nixon's administration came up with the five racial categories used for tallying the U.S. Census statistics: Black, White, Asian/Pacific Islander, native American/Eskimo, and Hispanic.
Rodriguez writes: "They aren't much, these drafty rooms--about what you'd expect of government issue. Nixon's fair attempted to describe the world that exists by portraying a world that doesn't. Statisicians in overalls moved India--ouffff!!--that heavy, spooled and whirligigged piece of Victorian mahogany, over beneath the green silk tent of Asia. Mayan Indians from the Yucatan were directed to the Hispanic pavilion (Spanish colonial) which they must share with Argentine tangoistas, Colombian drug dealers, and Russian Jews who remember Cuba from the viewpoint of Miami."
Anyways, there's so much more but I don't think the idea of blogging is to fill the ether with excerpts from books. Only to add that today I went into San Francisco where I bought coffee from a young man who moved here recently from Jordan (was he white?), sat in the library next to someone who might be called black, African American or maybe just North African, but anyways, he had peroxide blond dreadlocks with nice touches of magenta, and hung out with my cousin Joseph from San Diego who says riding the bus in San Francisco is unlike anything he has ever experienced at home.
One more quote from the book:
"What Latin American might give the United States is a playful notion of race. Already the definitive blond in American is Tina Turner."
Right now I'm reading "Brown: The Last Discovery of America" by Richard Rodriguez. The ground he covers in this book is amazing. He is Hispanic although I think he laughes at the word and credits Richard Nixon as his "godfather" because in 1971, Nixon's administration came up with the five racial categories used for tallying the U.S. Census statistics: Black, White, Asian/Pacific Islander, native American/Eskimo, and Hispanic.
Rodriguez writes: "They aren't much, these drafty rooms--about what you'd expect of government issue. Nixon's fair attempted to describe the world that exists by portraying a world that doesn't. Statisicians in overalls moved India--ouffff!!--that heavy, spooled and whirligigged piece of Victorian mahogany, over beneath the green silk tent of Asia. Mayan Indians from the Yucatan were directed to the Hispanic pavilion (Spanish colonial) which they must share with Argentine tangoistas, Colombian drug dealers, and Russian Jews who remember Cuba from the viewpoint of Miami."
Anyways, there's so much more but I don't think the idea of blogging is to fill the ether with excerpts from books. Only to add that today I went into San Francisco where I bought coffee from a young man who moved here recently from Jordan (was he white?), sat in the library next to someone who might be called black, African American or maybe just North African, but anyways, he had peroxide blond dreadlocks with nice touches of magenta, and hung out with my cousin Joseph from San Diego who says riding the bus in San Francisco is unlike anything he has ever experienced at home.
One more quote from the book:
"What Latin American might give the United States is a playful notion of race. Already the definitive blond in American is Tina Turner."
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, June 19, 2002 at 9:29 PM.
You can skip to the end and leave a response.
» Post a Comment