As a matter of fact, I do remember reading that particular book a very long time ago, at the very beginning of my interest in comparative religion, and finding it rather good and much better than some of the crap I had been reading before.
I read selections in an anthology years ago & of course Norman Brown quoted her extensively in Love's Body. Googling Laurette Sejourne I see that she was: A) Italian b) the widow of Victor Serge c)alas of course a commie
I don't believe that the widow of that very brave man Victor Serge can have been an orthodox Communist. (Serge was one of the people who put me on the right track with respect to Bombacci and Mussolini, although he didn't see how the pieces added up.) And now I remember rather better what I thought of her work. I thought that her attempt to de-historicize the appalling track record of the Aztecs and their predecessors was doomed from the start, but that she nevertheless made a very interesting job of drawing out what might have lain behind the atrocities.
I made considerable efforts to find Memoirs of a Revolutionary as a teenager after I read about Serge in Dwight Macdonald's esssays from the 1940's . He was then all but forgotten in the US. The book had a great influence on me. I dont remember what he said about Italian fascism - been 40 years.
I find myself intrigued enough that I may look up the complete Burning Water. Strange that a Milanese jacuzzi should revive an interest in Mesoamerican religion.
Years ago one of my friends was woken up in the middle of the night by a flaming fishtank--the glass housing on her aquarium's heater had cracked, water leaked in and the heater caught on fire,causing flames to shoot out the top of the tank. /cool story bro
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpb
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Rats!
Date: 2011-11-12 04:40 pm (UTC)Re: Rats!
Date: 2011-11-12 04:43 pm (UTC)Re: Rats!
Date: 2011-11-12 05:12 pm (UTC)Googling Laurette Sejourne I see that she was:
A) Italian
b) the widow of Victor Serge
c)alas of course a commie
Re: Rats!
Date: 2011-11-12 05:28 pm (UTC)Re: Rats!
Date: 2011-11-13 03:06 am (UTC)Wikipedia says Séjourné joined the Mexican CP 'soon' after Serge's death (source is one Susan Weissmann, Victor Serge: The course is set on hope. Verso, London 2001). It seems incredible that she could have been an official Communist during Stalin's life butI know that some of the Mexican and Cuban Trotskyists werre willing to reconcile with the CP's after the Khruschev speech.
I find myself intrigued enough that I may look up the complete Burning Water. Strange that a Milanese jacuzzi should revive an interest in Mesoamerican religion.
JUST CURIOUS
Date: 2011-11-13 03:14 am (UTC)http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1945/05/bombacci.htm
Re: JUST CURIOUS
Date: 2011-11-13 04:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 07:37 pm (UTC)