Monday, April 27, 2009

Great Lakes histories & Quiliterature

by Sarah Marine


As a homegrown American Great Laker, I was of course drawn to the one of many Zone books on our Zone Book Display, entitled The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History. It is a sprawling study by a supersmart French guy named Jean-Pierre Chretien. His resources include colonial archives, oral tradition, archeaological discoveries, studies in anthropology & linguistics and his own thirty years of scholarship on the region which encompasses, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Eastern Congo and Western Tanzania. In a region today plagued by extreme violence he discovers histories rewritten, unexplored, misinterpreted and altogether undiscovered. I can't explain to you how I crave such a book written about my own midwestern seas of grandiosity.

Also, in keeping with the marine theme of this post so far, my own most exciting discovery this week has to do with a certain epigraph nestled within Jeff in Venice, Death in Varansi, which Bayard is currently reading.
The quote reads:

'This is not the river,
it's an explanation of the river
that replaced the river.'

Dean Young

swoon

Furthermore, I would like to share with you, dear blog readers, a few images of the current project undertaken by my In Cooperation Quilting Circle. The project was to create a 12inch by 12inch textile interpretation of the story 'Ironhead' from the collection Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender.

ironhead in the tall grass


mama pumpkinhead with baby ironhead

2 comments:

  1. i meant to tell you about that Dean Young epigraph, but i never continued reading that book. good thing you've got the good Doctor to pick up the slack.

    i really like Mama Pumpkinhead, she's very expressive and cute.

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  2. Mama Pumpkinhead is my favorite too.

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