I read Eduardo Galeano's Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History from July 23, 2016 to July 24, 2017 as a slow reading project. In it, Galeano, Sept. 3, 1940-April 13, 2015, a Uruguayan journalist, draws attention to history (people, art, sports, events), progress, and the lack thereof.
My first slow reading project was Peter Mattheissen's The Snow Leopard, a beautiful journal of his hike through the Himalayas in search of snow leopards and enlightenment. It inspired my interest in daily readings or reading a small portion of a book each day and in writing daily serials i.e. my Space Explorer 365 project and my work-in-progress on utopias and their mascots and monsters.
I began simultaneously reading A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke and will complete it on December 19, 2017.
Galeano's Children of the Days offered a profound daily reading experience. It brought beauty and layered meaning to each day. Every day, it provided a historical perspective and reminded me of something important. It was frequently ironic and pointed to the need for continued progress.
Quotable:
May 20: "In 1998 France passed a law that reduced the workweek to thirty-five hours. Work less, live more: Thomas More dreamed of this in Utopia, but we had to wait five centuries before a country finally dared commit such an act of common sense...Sanity did not last. When the thirty-five-hour week was ten years old, it expired."
December 21: On Enheduanna, historical figure, the first woman writer (a daughter of Sargon of Akkad, High Priestess of the goddess Inanna and the moon god Nanna in the Sumerian city-state of Ur) "...in writing she sang to the moon goddess Inanna, her protector, and she celebrated the joy of writing, which is a fiesta: like giving birth, creating life, conceiving the world."
December 31: "The word was 'Abracadabra,' which in ancient Hebrew meant and still means, 'Give your fire until the last of your days.'"
January 20: "...but American was a loving serpentarium."
January 31: We Are Made of Wind: Today in 1908, Atahualpa Yupanqui (historical figure 1908-1992, Argentine singer and guitarist) was born. In life they were three: guitar, horse and he. Or four, counting the wind.
February 8: When in 1980, a judge ruled kisses obscene and a jailable offense in the city of Sorocaba, Brazil: "The city responded by becoming one huge kissodrome. Never had people kissed so much. Prohibition sparked desire and many were those who out of simple curiosity wanted a taste of the unsophismable kiss.
March 6: "The Florist: Georgia O’Keeffe lived and painted for nearly a century and died still painting. She raised a garden of paintings in the solitude of the desert. Georgia’s flowers—clitoris, vulva, vagina, nipple, belly button—were chalices for a thanksgiving mass for the joy of having been born a woman."
kiss-o-drome [ fragment from SHADOW WORLD, story written and read by Eduardo Galeano ] from Johan Grimonprez on Vimeo.
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