Anthropology and rural development in West Africa Book

These books take a while to power through--i worked on this volume off & on for almost a week. it weighs in at 400 pages, & the publishers manage to pack a lot of words on to each page. it makes me realize how large fonts, pargins, & line spaces have grown in the last thirty years. no wonder we're living in an age of such itellectual complacency.

this volume spans a whopping eleven years, all of it spent living in the united states, mostly in california, with occasional jaunts to new york, where anis would undergo analysis. she writes seduction of the minotaur during this period, & partners with alan swallow, a small publisher who was willing to get her older backs back into print & try to get some american reviews & attention for her. i really enjoyed her writing about the creative process & working to finish her books, & the detail about working with a small publisher & the complication small/self-publishers face. i can relate, being a zinester! these parts of the book overflowed with book creative energy & practicality, which motivated me a lot to finish the writing for my new zine (another reason reading this book took so long--i was de-railed for some time doing my own writing & typing).

she also writes a lot about various filmmakers who approach her, wanting to adapt spy in the house of love to the big screen, but none of the script treatments pans out. she even flies out to sweden to meet a filmmaker working on "the sound of music," but she is displeased with his adaptation. she doesn't think any of the filmmakers truly understand her characters or the symbolism of her books. she's probably right, but--loosen the reins a little bit, lady. i don't know.

there is also a lot in this book about the correspondence she had with two writers in prison. one is serving a life stence for holding up a bank with a toy gun. he has rehabilitated himself in jail & is trying to get parole, but is denied. anaris & henry miller take up his cause, but to no avail. the other is a younger poet who is serving a ten-year sentence. he hasn't rehabilitated himself & intends to go back to a life of crime when he's out of jail. anais is sad that this criminal dude is being set free while the rebailitated writer is stuck behind bars. i liked her exchanges with the prisoners, although i was constantly annoyed by her being annoyed that the gifts she sent them in jail were returned to her--records of her reading, her own typewriter, etc. she writes about how she knows the rules but thought they'd allow her typewriter to be delivered anyway. if you know the rules, why did you bother? whatever. that's fine.

these books are pretty good for motivating a person to be creative when they are feeling kind of stuck. i relate a lot to anais's creative process, even though we obviously write about very different subjects. you definitely have to be in the right mood for these books, & if you read this one, you will have to be okay with reading A LOT about LSD & timothy leary. but it was the 60s, what were you expecting?