Martin Ramirez

Yesterday I put down Doris Lessing and her impressions of the efficacy of mosquitos nets in Rhodesia and read about Martin Ramirez.(Martin should have an accent on the i by the way) He is an "outsider" artist and it's fascinating that he was from a poor little village in Los Altos en Jalisco and ended up in an insane asylum in California drawing these fantastic drawings with found pieces of paper, bits of magazines for collages and endless little repetetive lines. He also used his own spit to create some of the effects. My favorite bit of the story was how his family back at home would get these now extremely valuable works in the mail and they ended up burning them all since he was diagnosed with TB and they thought they might get sick from them! Fuchi!
It also made me want to read some more Mexican history since it talked about the Cristero War of which I knew nothing. Billy referred me to some Mexican history book that he read but we are unable to locate it on Amazon. Not sure I could read a whole book on the history of Mexico but I like to imagine that I am the type of person who would.

The Chain Reader

I am creating this blog to remember exactly what it was I read yesterday, let alone what I read last year. I'm calling it Chain Reader because I have not been bookless since I was maybe 8 years old. Everywhere I go I carry a book, sometimes 2 or three "just in case". I am like a chain smoker of books. I'm already thinking of the next one before I put down this one down---lighting the next one up as it were. But what they were about or what I thought of them fades away in a matter of weeks.

Currently I am reading Doris Lessing's autobiography/memoir Under My Skin. So far Lessing seems to be spending more time pondering the nature of autobiography and memory than the actual how and why the petite Doris and her family ended up in Rhodesia. There are a lot of sensory memories of what I'll call politely, personal odors, the feel of people's clothes and rough abusive tickling by her parents. I suppose she is recreating the world through her own childhood prism. The rest, likes dates and places is vague.

Together Olivia and I are reading Nurse Matilda which I got in a little boxed set of three, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. They were on top of a tall shelf at the Strand in NYC and George had to pull them down for me. I almost fell over backwards with delight since they are tiny little books printed in England with little ribbons to mark the pages and Ardizzone is my all time favorite illustrator.They are delightfully un-PC and bad unsafe things are always happening, I see where Lemony Snicket got most of his inspiration from. I gloss over words like Gollywog and switches and Olivia get's to say all the things the poor baby in his droppy nappy says.

Last night I had a long talk with my friend Molly and when I heard she was reading Eat, Stink, Pray,Love by Elizabeth Gilbert I felt compelled to guide her elsewhere and hastily recommended And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. Molly is dealing with breast cancer right now and I thought this very funny book would be perfect for cheering her up although she is doing great. Only after hanging up did I remember that one of the main characters in it dies of cancer. Whoops. But on a more positive note I believe it was ovarian cancer not breast cancer although since I read it two weeks ago I'm not exactly sure what kind of cancer it was...not breast cancer though.

Plus Molly is doing well and has a sense of humor.