As in: Media

I got to see Sarah Vowell give a reading from her new book Assassination Vacation on Friday. Very fun. There were moments where I could hear Violet (from The Incredibles) on stage instead of the NPR commentator. In waiting for the talk, I flipped through her last collection of essays, Partly-Cloudy Patriot and found a passage that I had starred:

The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey caffe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bitter-sweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much. And, thanks to Sophie and Michael Coe's book The True History of Chocolate, I remembered that cacao beans were used as currency at the moment of European contact. When Christopher Columbus's son Ferdinand captured a Mayan canoe in 1503, he noticed that whenever one of the natives dropped a cacao bean, "they all stooped to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen." When you know such trivia, an act as mundane as having an overpriced breakfast drink becomes imbued with meaning, even poetry. Plus, I read a women's magazine article called "5 Fabulous Morning Rituals," and it said that after you "bask in bed" and "walk in nature" you're supposed to "ponder the sins of the conquistadors." (42)

I like many things about this passage, but the reason I noted it, in particular, is that it demonstrates, in a few short words, the method of Ulmer's "MEmorial." It ties personal experience to daily activity to cultural relationships to history and back again.

This kind of move is exactly why I like Sarah Vowell's essays—she reflects on American culture with both humor and insight; she draws these ties between light-hearted moments and serious ones.

Posted by briley at April 19, 2005 5:18 AM