I am currently reading Petér Nadás' 'Fire and Knowledge.' It is a mixture of short stories, essays, reportage, and miscellany. Nadás is a Hungarian writer. I don't remember where I heard of him, but I can assume that I read in the NYRB a review of one or the other of his works. I am sure of it. It might be the London Review, but I see those two as a trick-sided coin. Either way, I enjoy the fiction more than the non-fiction, which is rare for me. The stories are all told from the point of view of a younger person in 1960s or 1970s communist Hungary. There are subtle little bits here and there where something catches your attention as being radically alien to you; you follow the little flash of light down the path and a giant wrecking ball smashes into you. For a laugh. You get caught trying to sympathize or, worse, understand and identify with the people in the stories. You get smashed because you can't understand any of it as a lazy, unthinking, spoiled-brat American. And I think highly of Nadás for employing that technique.

I just finished a collection of stories by Roberto Bolaño. He was Chilean, but he lived all over the Spanish-speaking world until he died several years ago. A lot of the stories took place in and around Barcelona in the mid- to late-1970s. Which made me stop and think; they speak Catalan in Barcelona and isn't it weird that so many Latin American writers fled dictatorships in their homelands to go to a place where the memories of a Dictator were as fresh as raw milk and cowshit on your boots? Either way. Brilliant. It has sparked and fueled a rising interest within me to read more and more Spanish-speaking writers.

Some time ago, I encountered some poems by Borges. They were in the original Spanish, but, with the remnants of my extremely rudimentary Spanish from school, I was able to slightly discern what the poem was saying. This excited me and I have since been reading more and more stories and poems by Spanish writers. I have ordered bilingual editions of Rubén Darío and Cesar Valléjo. I have ordered two more books by Bolaño. I have some Neruda and my Borges. I am going to try and make some sense. I like the idea of it. This is the first time that I have actually appreciated that I learned Spanish in school (and college) instead of French. I still would have loved to have learned French, of course, but now I appreciate the richness of Spanish. Like Lorca and Neruda. We shall see.

Another topic itching at my brain has been the Iroquois Indians. The Haudenosaunee. People of the Long-house. They of the Five Nations. They were the original inhabitants of my home region and more and more, day after day, my fascination with their culture and history grows. I have been searching for an Iroquois-English Dictionary, but, remarkably, there do not seem to be any that are easily found or accessed. Not too shocking. Academia in this country only seems interested in the Native Peoples after they've been dead for a couple hundred years; then it is only their bones and pottery with which they want to deal. I did manage to find an Ethnobotanical study of the Iroquois, so that is a start. From the ground up, it seems, will have to be the direction I travel in this respect.

The Nation that lived here where I currently live was the Seneca Nation. They were the largest, I believe, of the Five Nations. They built villages and maintained large tracts of cultivated fields. Their hunting grounds stretched from Vermont to the Ohio River Valley and down into Maryland. They had songs and poetry. They now maintain a couple casinos and fight to protect their tax-free cigarette sales from the greedy bureaucratic claws of New York State. But the history and culture of the Seneca is as great as any peoples on Earth. Perhaps even in this Cosmos? I don't know. I cannot speak to that. I really shouldn't speak anymore about it until I am properly informed so as to not appear to be so ignorant.

Does anyone even read this? Hahaha.

I am basically writing this to stave off the real feelings that are welling up in my bowels. Probably because of the anonymity that this provides. And because nobody is reading this anyway. It makes it easy. Sublimate. Absorb. Release waste bi-product as gas. Move on to next adventure. Move on, again and again.