| | What I'm reading *
I've always read. While growing up, reading was a refuge when I found life too unpleasant or stressful. Consequently I've bought a lot of books over time as well.
Now that I'm no longer in the rich corporate phase of my life I've rediscovered the library. Dayton's library may be maligned by some but is still a great resource. One type of book I like to read is gay fiction and I was surprised to see a lot of it in the Dayton library's catalog. Plus you can even ask them to buy particular titles, and they will!
Below you can see the five most recent books either that I'm reading or that I've acquired. You can search my books, or you can see all my books. Also my classes page has links back to this page for the books for each class.
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Author: Mar?a Luisa Bemberg (director, writer)
| 2004-09-20 | 6303832431 | Camila: Love Against All Odds | Mar?a Luisa Bemberg (director, writer) | ML304 | | | This is a film, not a book, but I'm listing it anyway because it's required for a class, ML304, Spanish American culture. We're watching six movies that our professor thinks will teach us something about Latin America's culture and history.
The subtitle of this film, Love Against All Odds, explains a major portion of this film: in 19th century Argentina a young woman and a priest fall in love and defy her father and the church by running away together, only to be tracked down and executed by the government, which at that time enforced the rules of the Catholic church, which apparently wasn't pro-life back then as the couple's unborn child died along with them. Parts of the movie are pretty sappy, but there is a good shot of Imanol Arias' butt.
The movie is based on actual people, Camila O'Gorman and Ladislao Guti?rrez, whose story apparently was surpressed for years afterwards by the government of Argentina. More important for us ML304 students is probably the treatment of women at the time (Camila's father says women must be controlled either by a convent or a husband), the role of the Catholic church (definitely no separation of church and state), and the glimpses of Argentine history shown by the movie. Most American (Dr. Petreman went to great lengths to explain to us that citizens of the United States are not the only Americans but then admitted that even Latin Americans generally use the term the way we do) students have never heard of the United Provinces of the R?o de la Plata, of Juan Manuel de Rosas (the dictator mentioned in this film) or of the struggle between the Pacto Federal (federalist pact) and the Liga Unitaria (unitarian league) over whether Argentina should have a strong centralized government. Camila doesn't explain all that history but does make reference to it, which might spur some students to do some more investigating on their own.
By the way, Amazon.com lists this film as out of stock, but I checked it out for free at the Dayton Metro Library. | |
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