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Saturday, August first, 2009
Well this is a weird coincidence, or something... The same day I think about, and link to, Patrick Farley's Apocamon, Mr. Farley posts a notice to his LiveJournal -- he is rebooting Electric Sheep Comix! Nothing on the site yet; but this is great news. Thanks to Randolph for calling it to my attention. Randolph also linked to Farley's guest strip at DiceBox, Don't Look Back. What an excellent thing it is; you ought to go read it. And it looks like I have days of fun ahead of me getting acquainted with DiceBox...
 And aargh, speaking of weird coincidences, as I'm writing this post about Farley's reboot, I see my own host has gone down for reboot. I'll post this when it comes back...
posted morning of August first, 2009: Respond
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Friday, July 31st, 2009
I do not follow Fred Clarke's Left Behind analyses religiously; but when I do read one, I am never disappointed. In today's post, he looks at the unusual meaning of "literal" when that term is used by a fundamentalist Christian explicator of the Bible. We've already seen how, for Bruce as for Tim LaHaye, this word "literally" is not meant literally. For them it means something more like "my way." It's opposite would be "mere symbolism," which means for them, roughly, "any meaning other than the meaning imposed on a passage by reading it my way." Clarke reads LaHaye's explanation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and my mind is  drawn irresistably to Patrick Farley's Apocamon -- I can see the First through Fourth Living Creatures calling out, "Come and See!" and once again I feel sad. So sad, because Apocamon is no longer available ever since a spammer stole Farley's Electric Sheep domain name... Well, one thing led to another, and I looked at Google, and Apocamon is back on the web. Not only that, but Farley has written two new episodes of it since the last time I saw it! Go and See! It is seriously one of the finest comics I've ever read. I wonder if the rest of the Electric Sheep strips are online again -- they don't seem to be at Serializer but some searching is in order.
posted evening of July 31st, 2009: 5 responses
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Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
I dreamt of frozen detectives in the great
refrigerator of Los Angeles
in the great refrigerator of Mexico City.-- Roberto Bolaño
I'm getting really excited and champing at the bit to read Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Inherent Vice, which will be coming out one week from today (if my fingers are accurate). Here are some preparatory links I've been collecting over the last little while:
- Louis Menand's review in the New Yorker is to my way of thinking, a model for how book reviews ought to be written. Every other review of this book I've read has contained the same superficial, thoughtless (and in some cases debatable) bits of information -- that the novel is a detective story set in Los Angeles, the main character "Doc" Sportello is a stoner and gumshoe, that the story is more straightforward and plotted than your archetypally cryptic Pynchon novel, that Hollywood is talking about optioning rights, a first for the famously unfilmable TRP... Menand goes much deeper, pulls in Pynchon's other work in specific ways rather than general, really thinks about the consequences of what he is saying.
- Tim Ware of thomaspynchon.com has created an Inherent Vice Wiki, initialized with his page-by-page notes. It's just waiting for other people to read the book and start contributing.
- Wired has published The Unofficial Pynchon Guide to Los Angeles, an interactive map of the city marked up with references from Inherent Vice. Useful for finding your way around as you read.
- Update: And furthermore: the mysterious Basileios (of the Against The Day weblog) will be keeping an Inherent Vice weblog as well. This seems like good news to me.
 Speaking by the way of excellent book reviews, Giles Harvey has a very nice take (and cleverly titled!) on Bolaño's The Skating Rink in the Abu Dhabi National. Thanks for the link, badger!
posted evening of July 28th, 2009: Respond
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Finally today I read a notice that The Elephant's Journey is going to be published in English; but not until more than a year from now! Jull Costa will be translating it, as I had assumed she would be; Houghton Mifflin will publish it next fall.
posted morning of July 28th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, July 27th, 2009
The bedroom door, which was only pushed to, opened softly in the darkness. Tomarctus, the household dog, had come in. He came to find out if this master, who only turns up very  infrequently, was still here. He is a medium-sized dog, and inky black, not like other dogs that, when seen from up close, are really gray.
Nice to see the dog making his appearance -- I think there have been dogs in every Saramago book I've read so far -- it is a nice linking thread. Tomarctus is the name of a prehistoric species which is an ancestor of canis familiaris.I am wondering about the roles of the female characters in this book, Maria, Helena, and Tertuliano's mother. Each one of them seems pretty cryptic in her own way.
posted evening of July 27th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, July 25th, 2009
They say that if you meet your double, you should kill him -- or that he will kill you. I can't remember which; but the gist of it is, that two of you is one too many.-- Double Take
I'm midway through The Double now, and still not sure how to approach reading it. It seems at times like a Woody Allen movie, exploring the humorous consequences of its main character's depression/inferiority complex; at other times I think Saramago has something enlightening to say about depression, but the (overly?) dismissive tone of his narrator makes it impossible to develop this much -- every thing he says, he cuts down. I'm pretty sure the intent of the book is neither broad comedy nor pedagogy, but I'm sort of alternating between these poles in my reading -- I'm hoping Saramago will show his hand a bit when the doubles meet.Bill of Orbis Quintus linked to an interview with screenwriter Tom McCarthy, in which he discusses among other things his most recent project, the movie Double Take (a longer article about the movie is at Art in America). Sounds great -- he says it is based on "a Borges tale about meeting his own double" -- at first I thought this was referring to "Borges and I", but this is probably wrong, unless the relationship between the source text and the movie is very loose indeed.* He's changed it around so that the movie is about Alfred Hitchcock rather than Borges, which seems to me like a excellent move -- not that I wouldn't be glad to see a movie about Borges, but throwing Hitchcock into the mix can only produce good consequences. Here is a clip: ...And yikes! another, mind-boggling, clip underneath the fold.
* (The story referenced is "The Other", from The Book of Sand.)
 (...And thinking further, I'd say the relationship between source text and movie is indeed very loose, and who knows, "Borges and I" may have been the inspiration for this. I need to see more of the movie to have any actual opinion about this, though.)
↻...done
posted afternoon of July 25th, 2009: 3 responses
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Sunday, July 19th, 2009
The video Máximo Afonso rents at the beginning of The Double is called Quem Porfia Mata Caça -- internet translation sites seem to think this proverb should be translated as "Where there's a will, there's a way"; Jull Costa chooses "The race is to the swift" -- which does sound like a good title for a movie, though from checking with imdb, it does not appear to have been used that way yet. This title is repeated several times in the first few pages -- makes it seem like riffing on the adage is going to be an important part of the book. I think the literal translation is something like "He who perseveres will kill his prey."
posted morning of July 19th, 2009: 3 responses
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Saturday, July 18th, 2009
Yikes! I am starting another book by José Saramago -- namely The Double. I haven't heard much about this one, I think Jorge has referenced it once or twice as an enjoyable read. It is from 2003, after The Cave and before Seeing. Just want to say up front, with each book I read of his I am more deeply in awe at the breadth of his writing -- what is prompting this is one of the few explicit references I've seen him make within a novel to his other work. On page 2, Saramago is describing Máximo Afonso as a solitary man who has "succumbed to the temporary weakness of spirit ordinarily known as depression."
What one mostly sees, indeed it hardly comes as a surprise anymore, are people patiently submitting to solitude's meticulous scrutiny, recent public examples, though not particularly well known and two of whom even met with a happy ending, being the portrait painter whom we only ever knew by his first initial, the GP who returned from exile to die in the arms of the beloved fatherland, the proofreader who drove out a truth in order to plant a lie in its place, the lowly clerk in the Central Registry Office who made off with certain death certificates,...
Gosh! four of his other novels and only two that I have read! (plus one that is on my reading list.) I wonder if the portrait painter is the main character of Manual of Painting and Calligraphy. ...Somehow I had been going along thinking that Baltasar and Blimunda was his first major novel, that I was close to mastering his back catalog. Somehow I had formed the silly impression that Manual of Painting and Calligraphy was what it claimed to be, that based on this and Journey to Portugal, Saramago's previous, untranslated works were not fiction. That is clearly false and it looks like if I really want to know his work, I need to learn Portuguese -- or at least get better at Spanish, it looks like almost all of his novels are translated into that language. As far as his poetry, I've been reading some of it in Spanish online; I think the combination of reading in Spanish for understanding and Portuguese for the sound will be sufficient for getting it, at least once I figure out how to pronounce Portuguese.
posted morning of July 18th, 2009: 3 responses
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In the course of reading the second half of Baltasar and Blimunda I had sort of begun to assume that the end of the novel would feature the cripple and the clairvoyant repairing Bartolomeu's flying machine and taking again to the air -- I have come to expect a romantic vision of Saramago's novels in which the protagonists transcend their gritty reality through love. (This is a little simplistic, and it certainly does not apply to every one of his books, but speaking very broadly it is a common feature of a lot of his fiction -- and it just seemed like it would be the natural ending for this book.) The fairy-tale imagery was making me expect a fairy tale. Do not want to give away the ending, exactly -- I am recommending this book very strongly and it is always a better reading experience not to know just what's coming -- suffice to say that while the airship does fly again and while broadly speaking, the ending does involve the protagonists transcending their gritty reality through romantic love, it is much, much darker and less pat than what I was imagining.
posted morning of July 18th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
As in tales of yore, a secret word was uttered and before a magic grotto there suddenly arose a forest of oak trees that could be penetrated only by those who knew the other magic word, the one that would replace the forest with a river and set thereon a barge with oars. Here, too, words were uttered, If I must die on a bonfire, let it at least be this one, the demented Padre Bartolomeu Lourenço had once exclaimed, perhaps these bramble thickets are the forest of oak trees, this woodland in flower the oars and the river, and the distressed bird the barge, what word will be spoken that will give meaning to all of this.
This scene feels like a critical juncture. Baltasar and Blimunda have already been into the sky and back to land, back to Malfa and the drudgery and toil of building the convent, and now for the first time they are venturing together back to the wrecked airship. And suddenly Saramago is speaking in terms of a fairy tale and wondering what word can be spoken that will give meaning to all this. This passage illuminates his earlier efforts to give meaning to the labour of the six hundred men transporting a stone from the quarry to the construction site, by naming them and telling their story; it casts a subtle light on Saramago's project in telling this story.
posted evening of July 14th, 2009: Respond
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