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Tyndareus Crushed, by Igor Mitoraj (taken August 2005)

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Jeremy's journal

The alternatives are not placid servitude on the one hand and revolt against servitude on the other. There is a third way, chosen by thousands and millions of people every day. It is the way of quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration.

J.M. Coetzee


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Saturday, March 28th, 2009

🦋 Tom Bombadil

I stayed up late last night reading The Fellowship of the Ring; it is starting to really come together for me. In the first several chapters I was feeling a little annoyed at the pace -- granted this is a three-volume, 1500-page story that is being set up, so it is only reasonable that Tolkien spend some time setting it up... Around Chapter VII ("In the House of Tom Bombadil") is where the story really begins to pick up and feel interesting to me. For one thing I just love the characters Tom and his wife Goldberry -- "characters" might not be the right word here, they are just quick sketches meant to move the story along; but they are lovingly drawn and engaging.

I see a potential criticism of this book, of the early part at least, that Frodo and his friends are just moving along from one deus ex machina to the next. Compare Frodo and company getting lost in the Barrow Downs, with Bilbo and the dwarfs getting lost in Mirkwood. The two sequences are built up similarly: the characters follow illusions into the wilderness and are separated and black out, then the main character awakens and finds his companions hostage. In The Hobbit, Bilbo rescued the dwarfs by calling on an inner reserve of strength which we did not know he had, fighting off the spiders with his dagger; in Fellowship, Frodo rescues his companions by invoking the song of Tom Bombadil -- Tom comes and destroys the barrow-wight without breaking a sweat. This avoids being lame by virtue of Tom being such a fun presence -- I was happy enough to see him back in the story for a bit longer, I didn't bother about the ease with which they busted out. And of course this is taking place much earlier in the story, than the Mirkwood episode in The Hobbit.

posted morning of March 28th, 2009: 2 responses
➳ More posts about The Lord of the Rings

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

🦋 After García Márquez

I find very interesting the idea (which I found at La Bloga's interview with Daniel Alarcón, on the occasion of Zoetrope: All-Story's publishing its new Latin American Issue) that Latin American literature has fallen captive (at least as it is seen from North America) to the legacy of García Márquez -- that diverse strands of work are "interpreted through the single, constricting and somewhat outdated lens of magical realism." This issue looks like it will do something to push back against that tendency; I'm looking forward to reading it and perhaps to looking at Diego Trelles Paz' anthology of new authors (authors under 40, those born after Cien años de soledad), El futuro no es nuestro.

Alarcón and Trelles Paz have more to say about the legacy of Cien años de soledad (which "we would describe -- without exaggeration -- as perfect") in the editor's note to the Latin American issue.

posted evening of March 25th, 2009: 4 responses
➳ More posts about Cien años de soledad

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

🦋 Ferlinghetti in my life

I was pretty young when I found out about A Coney Island of the Mind -- I bought a copy at one of the bookstores on Telegraph Ave. and it's the first book of poetry I can remember carrying around in high school. I just loved the title! And the poems themselves began gradually to sink in, too... I read them today and they are familiar like old relatives and slightly embarrassing too, like old relatives can be; but it seems to me like there is real beauty in them mixed in with the clumsyness.

I have not lain with beauty all my life
telling over to myself
its most rife charms

I have not lain with beauty all my life
and lied with it as well
telling over to myself
how beauty never dies
but lies apart
among the aborigines
of art
and far above the battlefields
of love

It is above all that
oh yes
It sits upon the choicest of
Church seats
up there where art directors meet
to choose the things for immortality
And they have lain with beauty
all their lives
And they have fed on honeydew
and drunk the wines of Paradise
so that they know exactly how
a thing of beauty is a joy
forever and forever
and how it never never
quite can fade
into a money-losing nothingness

Oh no I have not lain
on Beauty Rests like this
afraid to rise at night
for fear that I might somehow miss
some movement beauty might have made

Yet I have slept with beauty
in my own weird way
and I have made a hungry scene or two
with beauty in my bed
and so spilled out another poem or two
and so spilled out another poem or two
upon the Bosch-like world

A couple of more poems below the fold.

posted evening of March 24th, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about Lawrence Ferlinghetti

🦋 Happy Birthday, Larry!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 90 years old today. What a milestone! He is one of my favorite poets -- this evening when I have some time I would like to pick out a couple of his pieces to post here. In the mean time you ought to give him a birthday present by heading over to City Lights and buying a book.

Ooh and look at this! Nick Lowe (the Jesus of Cool) turns 60 today! And Olivia is 9 years old. A good day for birthdays.

posted morning of March 24th, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about Birthdays

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

🦋 Wanting to be Flaubert

Orhan Pamuk was awarded an honorary doctoral degree by the University of Rouen last week; in his acceptance speech, he reflects on the modernist ideal of the reclusive author, and what he and other authors have taken from Flaubert. h/t LanguageHat.

posted morning of March 23rd, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk

🦋 FMLN

By way of Saramago's Notebook, I see that Mauricio Funes, of the FMLN, has been elected President of El Salvador; ARENA will leave office peacefully after 2 decades in power. This strikes me as fantastic news. In El País, Moíses Naím speculates as to whether the new center of power in Latin America will be Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. It is natural to think an FMLN victory would give Chávez more influence; and Lula's recent meeting with Obama can be seen as the end of "a long period of disengagement between the US and Latin America."

Saramago notes that Mauricio Funes shares his surname with Funes the Memorious, and advises him:

...Thousands of men and women [have witnessed] at last, the birth of hope. Do not disappoint them, Mister President. The political history of South America breathes deception and frustration, whole peoples tired of lies and deceit; it is time, it is urgent that all that change.

posted morning of March 23rd, 2009: 1 response
➳ More posts about Politics

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

🦋 Otros libros de Castellanos Moya

By way of Scott Esposito, I see that two more novels of Horacio Castellanos Moya will be published in translation this year: She Devil in the Mirror and Dances With Snakes. Exciting! and searching around for more information about the novels, I notice Dr. Albrecht Buschmann of the Universität Potsdam maintains a fairly extensive site devoted to Castellanos Moya's work: Horacio Castellanos Moya: Hechos, Libros, Temas (bilingual in German and Spanish, with the occasional page translated into English). The site appears to be dedicated to reading his work as a literature of the survivor: "Reading the more important novels of Horacio Castellanos Moya may leave the impression that all of his protagonists are damaged goods... Figures with mutilated identities, deteriorated memories, who interact frequently with a choice between themselves exerting violence or being made into victims of violence, when they try to survive. For this is certainly what they intend to do: survive."

posted evening of March 19th, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about Horacio Castellanos Moya

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

At Orbis Quintus today, I found Maureen Freely's new Washington Post piece on translating Pamuk, on trying "to recreate the narrative trance that makes the novel so hypnotic in Turkish." It's a lovely essay, a look into the translator's creative experience -- at the "shadow novelist [who is] present in every translator. Though she must serve the text, she can recreate the author's voice only if she gets so close to the heart of the novel that she can convince herself it briefly answers to hers." (Now I'm just dying to hear from Gün and from Göknar...)

At the same page is an audio clip of a conversation between Freely and the Post's writer-at-large Marie Arana.

posted evening of March 18th, 2009: Respond

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

🦋 The judgement to tell the false from the true

I've been meaning to post this passage from The Amber Spyglass, which I found deeply moving and which I think sums up the entire trilogy in a couple of paragraphs. I don't have much to say about it beyond that, so will just quote. (Note: if you are reading or planning to read the series and do not like spoilers, don't read this entry.) The setting is the world of the dead; Lyra and Will are planning to create an opening which will allow the ghosts of the dead to escape into the world of the living, that they might be annihilated, allowed truly to die.

Long quote below the fold.

read the rest...

posted morning of March 15th, 2009: 5 responses
➳ More posts about His Dark Materials

🦋 Tolkien's voice

How I come to be reading The Hobbit now: Sylvia and I are pretty close to finishing up The Amber Spyglass now; I was casting about for what book to read next and realized that His Dark Materials is reminding me in some key ways of Tolkien's trilogy. That made me think about how much I had loved The Hobbit as a kid -- if memory serves I loved it much more deeply than the trilogy, it seems like I read The Lord of the Rings less whole-heartedly, with an eye mostly toward keeping up with my D&D-enthusiast friends... Anways -- so I asked Sylvia if she would like to read this next, she said she would (unsurprising -- she's really getting into fantasy novels nowadays), and I thought I would look through it beforehand.

And I'm falling in love all over again. I had forgotten how attractively witty and cultured Tolkien's narrative voice is -- it reminds me a lot of Grahame's voice in The Wind in the Willows. I wonder if this is true of the trilogy as well -- I expect it is, and suddenly I'm looking forward to rereading those books, and thinking I might get a lot more out of them than I did back in my childhood.

posted morning of March 15th, 2009: 4 responses
➳ More posts about The Hobbit

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