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Friday, May 16th, 2008
Looks from this article like the movie Blindness is going to be really dreadful. That's so disappointing! The book could absolutely be made into an excellent movie -- it is "cinematic", visual detail is such a key part of it. But Dargis' description gives me a sense of exactly how Blindness should not have been made into a movie -- with overt concentration on the allegorical aspects of the story. Saramago really played this down, except for the cathedral scene and a couple of spots while the characters were interned, and of course the very end -- but the end should be surprising, should take your breath away. If Meirelles is using blinding light effects throughout the movie, I can't imagine the end is going to feel meaningful at all.
posted evening of May 16th, 2008: 1 response
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Thursday, May 15th, 2008
At Edge of the American West, there is a fun thread about anticipating new books by your favorite authors. There was no criterion really specified for how to choose the authors you list; here is what I used: an author all or most of whose back catalog I have read*, and if I read about a new book of whose being published, I would run out to the bookstore and buy a copy. Most books I've bought in my life have been used; buying just-published books is a pretty new experience. I think this is a complete list of the books that I've bought on the day of their publication: Mason & Dixon, The Keep, Against the Day, Other Colors. (And come to think of it, I've pre-ordered a couple of books from Amazon or similar, so received them at the time of their publication. So probably should add to the list Monk's Music, and Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk which I await anxiously, and the two volumes so far of Moomin comics.)
 *Except Saramago, I've only read two of his books.
posted afternoon of May 15th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
It occurs to me that I ought to read the rest of the Divine Comedy when I finish the Inferno, then read La Vita Nuova, and then I would probably have enough background to understand and like The New Life. Who knows, maybe I'll do it. I wonder if Dante's other works are available in reputable translations?
 Update: Hmm, well seems like given that I like the terza rima, the Dorothy Sayers translation may be the only way to go for Purgatory and Paradise. All the other translations appear to be in prose or blank verse. ...Except Lawrence Binyon, which also has rhyme. Guess I will go to a bookstore and look at some of them side by side.
posted evening of May 13th, 2008: Respond
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"Pape Satàn, pape Satàn, aleppe!"
Plutus began in a gutteral, clicking voice.
The courteous sage who knew all reassured me: "Don't let fear harm you; whatever power he has
Cannot prevent us climbing down this rock.
It seems to me like that "Pape Satàn, aleppe!" line was the first thing I ever knew from the Inferno. I think Eliot quotes it somewhere, probably in The Waste Land, and that my researching his quote in high school was the first thing that ever brought Dante to my attention. Could be misremembering though. It baffles and delights me how Dante, a pious Christian, can sprinkle pagan deities and ideologies throughout his afterlife. He basically has to do it, because all his literary reference points are pre-Christian; I like that he does not seem embarrassed about it.
posted evening of May 13th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, May 12th, 2008
Reading the Inferno today and I was having a little trouble with figuring out what it should sound like. So I took the obvious path and started reading aloud. And what a revelation! I think I am going to read this whole book aloud -- the sound is lovely and I'm understanding it better. I think I "get" terza rima now, the way it leads you through the canto; Pinsky's introduction was helpful in this regard, but what really made it concrete was to listen to the reading. My sense of reading poetry aloud has been heavily influenced by Heany's reading (or "declamation"?) of Beowulf, which I've been listening to a lot in the last couple of weeks.
 Try reading this aloud:
"My son," said the gentle master, "here are joined
The souls of all who die in the wrath of God,
From every country, all of them eager to find Their way across the water -- for the goad
Of Divine Justice spurs them so, their fear
Is transmuted to desire. Souls who are good Never pass this way; therefore, if you hear
Charon complaining at your presence, consider
What that means." Then, the earth of that grim shore Began to shake: so violently, I shudder
And sweat recalling it now. A wind burst up
From the tear-soaked ground to erupt red light and batter My senses -- and so I fell, as though seized by sleep. -- See how the meter leads you on through the passage. I'm finding it impossible to stop reading in the middle of a canto.
posted evening of May 12th, 2008: Respond
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I've been thinking about doing a "top 100 books" post, where the criterion for inclusion would be "the hundred books that I would recommend for you to read, in the order that they come to mind, and that I'm able to write a paragraph supporting why I think you should read them." This seems to me like a better paradigm than the traditional "top 100" list where the author(s) of the list are asserting that their judgement is a good guide to objective reality. So, not sure if or when I'll actually get to it but the thought has been going through my head. It will probably take a few weeks of working on it once I actually start, anyway. I may decide to make a birthday project of it, depending on what my weekend looks like.
posted afternoon of May 12th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, May 11th, 2008
I was looking through my bookshelf today for something to read, and thinking, I really need something different, a change of pace. Well what caught my eye was the Inferno, which I have been meaning to read for a while -- since 2005, when I bought this translation. I read the book a long time ago, in high school, in a different translation, and maybe again in college; but I think my ear has developed enough since then that I will get a lot out of rereading it now. So here I go!
posted evening of May 11th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, May 9th, 2008
Tonight we watched Crash. It's funny -- it reminded me in certain key ways of Lush Life, which I just finished reading; and my reaction to it was similar to my reaction to that book: it's a pretty gripping, entertaining story as long as you avoid thinking about the deficiencies in the plot and characterizations. If you just watch, don't think: a good movie. (In the end, not nearly as well-done a story as Lush Life, which despite having some similar defects is much more coherent.)
A.O. Scott's review is absolutely spot-on. Here is a nice line: "Metaphor hangs in the California air like smog."
posted evening of May 9th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
I have been following the discussion at The Edge of the American West about using fiction in history curricula with great interest. So it was on my mind this evening as I read Pamuk's essay "Mario Vargas Llosa and Third World Literature" (from Other Colors).
Is there such a thing as Third World literature? Is it possible to establish -- without falling prey to vulgarity or parochialism -- the fundamental virtues of the literatures of the countries that make up what we call the Third World? In its most nuanced articulation -- in Edward Said, for example -- the notion of a Third World literature serves to highlight the richness and the range of the literatures on the margins and their relation to non-Western identity and nationalism. But when someone like Fredric Jameson asserts that "Third World literatures serve as national allegories" he is simply expressing a polite indifference to the wealth and complexity of literatures from the marginalized world. Borges wrote his short stories and essays in the 1930s in Argentina -- a Third World country in the classic sense of the term -- but his place at the very center of literature is undisputed.
The essay follows a pattern I have noticed in Pamuk's literary essays: he lays out a great deal of history in a very small space, leaving it to the reader to fill in the elisions. The history here is that of  Llosa's relationship with the Existentialists (specifically Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus) and his break with Marxism. Of all this I know nothing besides a very general notion of Llosa as the Peruvian writer who was a radical youth but became quite conservative in his adulthood. (All I have read by the man is The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, and that when I was very young.) But Pamuk sketches the story so well, he gives me a feeling of familiarity with the actors. He makes me wish very strongly to read Death in the Andes:
This novel takes place in the abandoned and disintegrating small towns of the remote Andes -- in empty valleys, mineral beds, mountain roads, and one field that is anything but deserted -- and follows an investigation into a series of disappearances that may be murders.... Though Death in the Andes skirts tired modernist hypotheses about the Third World, it is still not a postmodern novel in the manner of, say, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. ...[I]t would be wrong to dismiss it as a coarse statement about inscrutable cultures, for it is a playful and mostly witty realist text about everyday life in Peru: in short, a trustworthy history.
Which last bit I guess is what made me think about Dr. Rauchway's post linked above and the comments thereto.
posted evening of May 7th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
I wrote in comments to Dr. Waterman's post at The Great Whatsit, that the first two stanzas of "To Brooklyn Bridge" had me anticipating a story -- maybe I should try and explain what I mean.  How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty --
Then, with inviolate cure, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
-- Till elevators drop us from our day... So: You see the seagull flying across the bay in the dawn in the first stanza -- and I think this stanza is really the most beautiful bit of the poem -- and the second gives a feeling of dropping, as if we are taking our eyes from the gull to look at the events below it. Great! We're going to have a poem describing some events on the lower Manhattan waterfront! But no; the lens never focuses after it leaves the gull. That's my complaint. "Till elevators drop us from our day" totally makes me think, "Till human voices wake us, and we drown."
Update: Waterman suggests that at least some of the images in subsequent stanzas could be interpreted as transformations of (or references to) the seagull. This is an interesting idea.
posted evening of April 29th, 2008: Respond
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