READIN

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

🦋 Duncan Pro-Fly

Just a note: my new yo-yo is about the easiest and most fun to spin of any yo-yo I've tried. It will come back in situations where most yo-yos would not. If you're looking for one to learn on or if you know how to do it and want to have some fun, I recommend this model.

(Note: It is not as heavy as a classic Duncan Imperial or Duncan Butterfly, so it will not sleep for as long as them; I mostly like doing looping tricks where sleeping is not as important.)

posted evening of December 16th, 2008: 1 response

🦋 Pairing off

The only real thing that exists at this moment on earth is our being here together...

Joachim is self-centered and needy; if the book's aim is to show him growing into a full human being by accepting love from a woman, well, it will still be a very good book but I will be disappointed. (I speculate about how I will feel about the book when I'm done reading it -- obviously I can't know.) A romance can be a very satisfactory read of course. But the first half of this book made it seem like it was going to be much more than that; hopefully Saramago is not headed where I am assuming he is.

posted evening of December 16th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about The Stone Raft

Monday, December 15th, 2008

🦋 Best translated books of 2008

Three percent has nominated 25 books for the title of "Best translated [into English] book of 2008" -- they are running posts about each of them over the next month, until January 27 when they'll pick ten finalists. Lots of good stuff in the list! (A couple of titles from there are going on my reading list.) Thanks to Scott for the link.

posted afternoon of December 15th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Readings

🦋 Reading List

OK, for 2009 I am doing something I've never really done before (that I can recall), which is to make a list of books I'm interested in reading this year. The list is not ordered; I'm just going to be adding titles to it as they occur to me, and without commentary. When I comment on a book that's on the list, I will update with a link to the diary for that book. I'm going to link this post in my sidebar, so it will be at hand for reference.

Just a few books for now, I'll build the list over the next few days. Note that I'm expecting 2009 to be mostly a year of reading Iberian and Latin American lit for me, not sure exactly how this will pan out though.

The List

Novels and stories

• City of God by Paolo Lins
• Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
• The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago
• Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
• What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? by António Lobo Antunes
• The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk, in Güneli Gün's translation.
• The Double by José Saramago
• The Elephant's Journey by José Saramago
• All the Names by José Saramago
• 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
• Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
• Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
• Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
• Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
• The Promised Land by Karel Shoeman
• Die Blendung by Elias Canetti
• Cien Años de Soledad by Gabriel García Márquez
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa
• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
• The Counterlife by Philip Roth (Started this, totally turned off.)
• My Two Worlds by Sergio Chejfec
• The Fat Man and Infinity by António Lobo Antunes
• The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee
• A Wild Ride Through the Night by Walter Moers
• The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

Non-fiction

• Cultural Amnesia by Clive James
• Borges in/and/on Film by J.L. Borges
• The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz
• Cuadernos de Lanzarote by José Saramago
• The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
• The Hunter Gracchus by Guy Davenport

Poetry

• Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolaño
• Paradise Lost by Milton
• Metamorphoses by Ovid

If you have any suggestions for me, any books you think would do me good, please put them in comments!

posted morning of December 15th, 2008: 6 responses
➳ More posts about Tsundoku

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

🦋 Language barrier

(Yikes! four posts about The Stone Raft this morning -- it's taken over my consciousness pretty completely.) Interesting: With the addition of Joana to group of travelers, there will be no more conversations that everybody understands. Pedro speaks only Spanish, Joana speaks only Portuguese -- José and Joachim are bilingual. I guess I had been vaguely assuming that most people in Portugal were competent in Spanish, not really sure why I would think such a thing though. When Pedro did not understand what was happening between Joachim and the border guard, it surprised me to realize that Joachim and José had not been speaking their native language with him.

I think it's easy to fall into a trap of viewing the two languages as more similar than they actually are, if most of your exposure to them is reading. It seems like if you just do some letter substitutions, written Portuguese looks pretty similar to written Spanish. I was surprised watching City of God last night, that I had mostly no clue what the characters were saying -- when I watch a Spanish film with subtitles, I can generally map the meanings in the subtitles to the sounds of what people are saying -- but here it was very much the exception for me even to recognize a word of the spoken dialog. I don't know how different the spoken Portuguese of Brazil is from that of Europe. (By the way, Paolo Lins' City of God is now on my list of books to read in 2009 -- the movie made me really want to find out more about the characters, and I think I'll be able to understand them better in book form.)

posted afternoon of December 14th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about José Saramago

🦋 Why Ereira?

The Mondego crossing at Ereira, 1952

Church at Ereira

I had the thought maybe Ereira was Saramago's birthplace, and went to check -- but it is not. He was born in Azinhaga, near where José Anaiço lives. (And I think it makes sense to identify José Anaiço with the author of this story.)

(With regards to Joana's feminine mystique: as they are walking to see the line, she says she will tell them the rest of her story. "You could have told us sooner, either in Lisbon or during the journey, José Anaiço remarked, I don't see why, ...As a reward for having believed in you, It's for me to decide your reward and when it should be given, José Anaiço refrained from answering,... but she heard Joachim Sassa murmur, What a girl, Joana Carda smiled, I'm no girl, and I'm not the bitch you think I am, I don't think you're a bitch, Domineering, stubborn, conceited, affected, Good heavens, what a list, why not say mysterious and leave it at that,...")

*Not quite -- her home is in Coimbra, but she's been living with relatives in Ereira for about a month, since separating from her husband.

posted morning of December 14th, 2008: Respond

🦋 Reverse psychology

This positively Baroque passage just made me dissolve in a fit of giggles. Hope you like it! José and Joachim are driving back to the hotel after dinner:

They finished their dinner, resumed their journey without haste, at the slow pace of the Deux Cheveaux, there was little traffic on the road, probably because of the scarcity of gasoline, they were fortunate in having a car that got such good mileage, But we would still run the risk of grinding to a halt somewhere or other, then our journey would really be over, Joachim Sassa remarked, then suddenly remembering, he asked, Why did you say the starlings must have gone away, Anyone can tell the difference between farewell and so long, what I saw was definitely farewell, I can't explain it, the starlings went away the moment Joana appeared, Joana, That's her name, You could have said the lady, the woman, the girl, that's how male diffidence refers to the opposite sex, when to use their names might seem much too familiar, Compared to your wisdom, mine is rudimentary, but, as you've just seen, I spoke her name quite naturally, proof that my inner self has nothing to do with this matter, Unless, at heart, you're much more Machiavellian than you appear, trying to prove the opposite of what you really think or feel so that I will think that what you think or feel is precisely what you only appear to be trying to prove, I don't know if I've made myself clear, You haven't, but never mind, clarity and obscurity cast the same shadow and light, obscurity is clear, clarity is obscure, and as for someone being able to say factually and precisely what he feels and thinks, don't you believe it, not because he doesn't want to, but because he cannot, Then why do people talk so much, Because that's all we can do, talk, perhaps not even talk, it's all a question of trial and error, The starlings went away, Joana arrived, one form of companionship went, another took its place, you should consider yourself fortunate, That remains to be seen.

This is a little uncharacteristic of Saramago's constructions: the "punch line", which I am identifying as "trying to prove the opposite of what you really think or feel so that I will think that what you think or feel is precisely what you only appear to be trying to prove," comes in the middle of the sentence -- then there is a digression into the nature of clarity and whether it can be achieved, leading into a second, fainter punch line, "That remains to be seen."

posted morning of December 14th, 2008: Respond

🦋 Reference

In the ninth chapter of The Stone Raft I find the second explicit reference to a work of literature that I've come across in Saramago's work. (The first was in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, to Borges' "Examination of the Works of Herbert Quain".) -- Pedro and Joachim are telling José about the stressful time they've had being examined by Portuguese authorities, and Joachim says (after Pedro has gone to bed), "...shall I tell you what this reminds me of, a story I read years ago entitled At the Mercy of the Quacks, Do you mean the story by Rodrigues Miguéis, That's the one."

Miguéis, 1901 - 1980, was a Portuguese author and illustrator. The best source for information about him on the net in English appears to be this page at Brown University. I don't see this story in the abbreviated bibliography offered there, but there are plenty of links for further research.

posted morning of December 14th, 2008: Respond

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

🦋 Kreutzworträtselspielerei

Over at the Fifth World they are talking about Hermann Hesse. I was reminded of how when I started reading Das Glasperlenspiel (about 13 years back or so; never finished or even got very far in), I took the narrator's attack (or what I perceived as an attack) on Crossword Puzzles very personally. I was doing the NY Times crossword every day at the time and reading this felt like being lectured about what a waste of time and consciousness it was:

Übrigens gehörten, so scheint es, zum Feuilleton auch gewisse Spiele, zu welchen die Leserschaft selbst angeregt und durch welche ihre Überfütterung mit Wissenstoff aktiviert wurde, eine lange Anmerkung von Ziegenhalß über das wunderliche Thema »Kreuzworträtsel« berichtet davon. Es saßen damals Tausende und Tausende von Menschen, welche zum größern Teil schwere Arbeit taten und ein scweres Leben lebten, in ihre freistunden über Quadrate und Kreuze aus Buchstaben gebückt, deren Lücken sie nach gewissen Spielregeln ausfüllten. Wir wollen uns hüten, bloß den lächerlichen oder verrückten Aspekt davon zu sehen, und wollen uns des Spottes darüber enthalten. Jene Menschen mit ihren Kinder-Rätselspielen und ihren Bildungsaufsätzen waren nämlich keineswegs harmlose Kinder oder spielerische Phäaken, sie saßen vielmehr angstvoll inmitten politischer, wirtschaftlicher und moralischer Gärungen und Erdbeben, haben eine Anzahl von schauerliche Kriegen und Bürgerkriegen geführt, und ihre kleinen Bildungsspiele waren nicht bloß holde sinnlose Kinderei, sondern entsprachen einem tiefen Bedürfnis, die Augen zu schließen und sich vor ungelösten Problemen und angstvollen Untergangsahnungen in eine möglichst harmlose Scheinwelt zu flüchten.

---

(Approximately:)
In addition to the feuilleton it seems as if there were certain games, which the reading public loved and through which the information overload was started, a long communication from Ziegenhalß about the wonderful idea of crossword-puzzle deals with this. There sat at this time thousands and thousands of people, for the most part hard-working people with hard lives, bent over quadrants and crosses of characters in their free time, filling in their blanks according to certain rules. We should guard against just seeing the ridiculous or crazy aspects of this, hold ourselves back from making fun. These people with their baby-puzzles and their picture-constructions were indeed in no way harmless children or playful (?Phäaken)* Phæacians, they sat fearful in the middle of political, economic and moral agitation and earthquakes, conducted a number of horrible wars and conflicts, and their little picture-games were not simply little senseless childishness, but rather they bespoke a deep unfilled need, a need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious imaginings of death into a world of appearances, as harmless as ever it could be.

This comes at the end of a couple of pages' discussion of the ridiculous idea of the feuilleton, which I believe means approximately "op-ed column" -- I hadn't thought of this before but it would be an interesting passage to keep in mind while reading The Black Book.

Figuring out how to translate Phäaken, below the fold.

*Phäaken is apparently the name of some kind of supernatural monster, maybe the best translation would be færies or something. Google results are mostly references to "Odysseus and the Phäaken", but all in German -- I'm not sure what part of the Odyssey this is from.... (looking at Google, looking at the Odyssey....) Aha! Never mind! It means Phæacians! I wonder what this connotes. ...I'm not totally sure of this, but I think the intended meaning is naïf: Nausicaa says,

We live too far apart, out in the surging sea,
off at the world's end --
no other mortals come to mingle with us.

(Book VI, l. 222 ff., Fagles' translation.) So if someone is a "Phæacian," he is callow and unfamiliar with the world -- is my best guess, anyhow.

Now I've got an image in my head that's hard to shake, of a drunken Captain Haddock hurling epithets at the object of his annoyance, muttering "Flibbering Phæacians!"

↻...done

posted evening of December 13th, 2008: 2 responses
➳ More posts about The Glass Bead Game

🦋 Minds shot together

Listen to the song available on this page, while looking at the image on this page. Fun, right?

(Thanks to a couple of people on the Fegmaniax list...)

posted evening of December 13th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Syd Barrett

Previous posts
Archives