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Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
Coincidence: the two times this year I have gone to the beach, I've taken along a book by Saramago -- he works really well for a relaxed read, lying in the sun. I'm not sure what it is exactly -- he's very "heavy" -- it takes a lot of thinking and re-thinking for me to get it. But the sun and the sand seem to help that along. A couple of nice bits from this weekend's reading, below the fold:
...It would help to clear my head too, so why don't we both go and pick Marçal up, and Found can stay here to guard the castle, If that's what you want, Don't be silly, I was just kidding, you usually go and fetch Marçal and I usually stay at home, so long live usually, No, seriously, we can both go, No, seriously, you go. They both smiled, and the debate on the central question, that is, the objective and subjective reasons we usually do what we do, was postponed.
Indeed, whether we mix water and clay, or water and plaster, or water and cement, we can cudgel our brains for as long as we like to come up with a name that is less vulgar, less prosaic, less common, but always, sooner or later, we come back to the word, the word that says all there is to say, mud. Many of the best-known gods chose mud as the material for their creations, but it is hard to know now if that preference represents a point in mud's favor or a point against.
We have already mentioned the fact that many anthropogenic myths made use of clay in the creation of man, and anyone moderately interested in the subject can find out more in know-it-all almanacs and know-it-almost-all encyclopedias.... There is, however, one case, at least one, in which the clay had to be fired in the kiln for the work to be considered finished. And then only after various attempts. This singular creator, whose name we forget, probably did not know about or did not have sufficient confidence in the thaumaturgic efficacy of blowing air into the nostrils as another creator did before or would do later, indeed, as Cipriano Algor did in our own time, although with the very modest intention of cleaning the ashes from the face of the nurse.
I might just as well drive the van into a wall, he thought. He wondered why he didn't do so and why he probably never would, then he listed his reasons. Although inappropriate in the context of his analysis, after all, being alive is, at least in principle, the main reason why people kill themselves, the first of Cipriano Algor's strong reasons for not doing so was the fact of being alive...
Also -- I got a chance to read some passages to Sylvia, mainly involving the adoption of Found by Cipriano and his daughter, and she seemed really into it. Sylvia thinks Found is better behaved than Pixie.
↻...done
posted afternoon of July 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Friday, July 18th, 2008
So after a spate of short and varying-degrees-of-silly posts, I'm going away for a coupl'a days -- my cousin Andy is getting married! So Sylvia and I are jetting off to San Diego this evening. Be back on Wednesday or thereabouts.
posted morning of July 18th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, July 17th, 2008
 I did not know until today about Joss Whedon's new movie (movie? I don't see any indication that it will be in theaters -- it is an internet phenomenon but it sure looks like a movie), Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Just now I watched the first episode -- what a great thing this is! Nothing to say about it yet other than, go take a look.
 ...Oop, well, you can't go take a look any longer, not without paying at any rate.
posted evening of July 17th, 2008: 2 responses
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Tonight we went to the local park to watch a screening of Wallace and Gromit -- the three shorts, "A Grand Day Out", "A Close Shave", and "The Wrong Trousers".  Wonderful movies, and nice to watch them outdoors on a hot summer night. I was wondering if anybody had noticed the resemblance between Pixar's character WALL•E, and the robot that lives on the moon in "A Grand Day Out".
 ...Yep, well, A.O. Scott noticed the allusion in his review of WALL•E -- which I read a couple of weeks ago! I didn't catch that at the time... Google tells me a lot of other reviewers caught it too.
posted evening of July 17th, 2008: Respond
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This is an idea whose time is long overdue.
posted afternoon of July 17th, 2008: Respond
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 Dr. Healy proposes a particle theory of social interactions, featuring up, downer, top bloke, charm, strange, and asshole varieties of Quirk.
posted afternoon of July 17th, 2008: Respond
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 Today's Achewood contains, among Beef's notions of how it's going unpleasantly to end up, one of the best lines I've ever seen in that strip: "Guy from the county comes and checks the Yes box after Is It A Shame"
 ...CortJstr notes that it could be worse: "He could check the Yes box after Is It For The Best"
posted morning of July 17th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
This is just twisted. Absolutely down the rabbit-hole and out the other side weird. (h/t Apo.)
posted evening of July 16th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
When I was just getting started on Blindness, I wrote that Saramago's style of rendering dialog was "dismissive," and threatened to make his characters "sound like automata." I don't think that was exactly right (although it may have accurately described my impression at the time) -- based on how completely human his characters seem to me. But I want to pick at this for a bit and figure out what is my impression of Saramago's dialog -- it has certainly struck me as one of the most important aspects of his novels. Allow me to quote some portions of a conversation between Marta and her husband, Marçal, about Marçal's parents wanting to come live with them. Sorry about the ellipses, the passage is too long to quote in full:
What's wrong, asked Marta, suddenly uncertain, Nothing important, just a few niggling little problems, At work, No, What then, We have so little time together and yet they still won't leave us alone, We don't live in a bell jar, I dropped in at my parents' house, Did something happen, some complication. Marçal shook his head and went on... I said that we were intending having your father to live with us when we moved..., You told them that, Yes, but they took no notice, they practically started yelling at me and crying, well, my mother did, my father's not really the sloppy type, he just protested and waved his arms around a lot, what kind of a son am I, putting the interests of people who aren't of the same blood over the needs of my own progenitors, they actually used the word progenitors, heaven knows where they found it..., And that was the final word, To be honest, I don't know if it was or not, I've probably forgotten a few others, but they were all out of the same mold. ...Marçal said, I know a son shouldn't say things like this, but the fact is I don't want to live with my parents, Why, We've never understood each other, I've never understood them and they've never understood me, They're your parents, Yes, they're my parents, and on one particular night, they went to bed, happened to be in the mood, and I was the result... Marta took Marçal's left hand, held it in hers, and murmured, All fathers were sons once, many sons become fathers, but some forget what they were and no one can explain to the others what they will become, That's a bit deep, Oh, I don't understand it myself really, it just came to me, pay no attention, Let's go to bed, All right. They got undressed and lay down. The moment for caresses came back into the room and apologized for having spent so much time outside, I got lost, it said, by way of an excuse, and suddenly, as sometimes happens with moments, it became eternal. A quarter of an hour later, their bodies still entwined, Marta said softly, Marçal, What is it, he asked sleepily, I'm two days late.
What is it? -- It seems to me the dialog has a certain fuzzy quality, you are constantly reminded that it is the narrator who is speaking, not the characters. But you get the impression that he is a faithful and a sympathetic narrator, that his paraphrase captures accurately the rhythm of language as spoken and heard by his subjects. In most novels, dialog serves in part to crystallize the scene, to bring sharply into focus what is happening and whom it's happening to; the dynamic in Saramago's novels is kind of the opposite -- dialog pulls the lens back and mutes the focus. You identify with the characters but with the understanding that you are identifying with the narrator's descriptions of them, and thus with the narrator.
posted evening of July 15th, 2008: 4 responses
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Sunday, July 13th, 2008
That's what Robyn Hitchcock's grandma used to say, or so he told us this evening -- he said nobody ever turned into his grandma, so he dedicated "I'm Only You" to her. This was the second song, after "The Museum of Sex" -- I was happy to hear him open with this song after I had opened my mix tape with it. "I'm Only You" was followed by a long digression on digestion, and whether and under what circumstances we would feel comfortable discussing our digestions, leading into "a digestion song", viz. "The Cheese Alarm", which made Ellen (and me) laugh out loud with its urgency. "Please! Somebody ring the cheese alarm!" Robyn conducted a dialogue with the audience after, asking if WALL-E is any good -- "Yeah!" -- "That's good to know... Can you all hear this?" -- "Yeah!" -- "That's good to know -- it's reassuring to think this is all not just going on in here..." and played, with much dancing during the solos, "I Got the Hots for You" and "Glass Hotel". "Thank you --" and as he started playing "Idonia", "This is about someone who left a hole the shape of themselves in somebody else's life." As he was retuning to play his next song, people in the audience were calling out requests, and he said with just enough of an edge to get them to stop, "You know there's a thin line between a devoted admirer and a creep... To be a slave to love -- what a thing!" and sang "The Idea of You". A long digression about the Victorians -- "It's possible that the Victorians were frightened by sex... Victorians wrote mostly in longhand, no e-mail. But biologically they were much the same as us..." reflecting on the possibilities of interbreeding between modern humans and Victorians, getting particularly interesting if the Victorians in question are your own ancestors; "Screw your great-grandparents! Whole empires have been founded on worse. But this song is not really about that:" and launched into the hilarious "Victorian Squid". "Thank you -- it's all true."
The next song, "Creeped Out", went out to "a friend of mine -- it's her birthday on Monday. Happy birthday, friend!" and while he tuned up for the next song, he said: "There's something insanely simple about watching somebody perform songs he's written -- it's like somebody sending you YouTube videos of cats..." and dedicated the song, which was "I Feel Beautiful", to "Michèle and our cat". Ellen thought this was a really smart lyric, and I agree. "How many people find the idea of eternity relaxing?" Not many -- mostly we want finitude. Robyn played "Oceanside", which was maybe the only song of the evening that really had me wishing for a band behind him. "This isn't exactly about Arthur Lee -- it's just around him..." and sings "The Wreck of the Arthur Lee", which I guess I had not realized was about a person. "It's a funny thing about eulogies -- essentially it's sad -- ... what really makes people cry at a funeral is the jokes," by way of explaining why he had written "Underground Sun" so upbeat -- it's about a friend who died, who was "definitely not a dismal person." "When people are dead they don't have an age." "I'll leave you with a blast of folk-rock sound," Robyn tells us as he dons his harmonica, and plays "Only the Stones Remain" with a downright amazing harmonica part. But we clapped and clapped, and he came back out to perform a long encore -- wearing his purple shirt with iguanas rather than his orange shirt with dingbats. "You've Got Heaven"* was the first song in the encore, and Ellen's favorite song of the evening. Then a song I don't know (and can't find at The Asking Tree), with the chorus "I'm gonna see you in the afterlife." And finally, after a long digression about cones (during which he wished us all "an incredibly long rest of your lives"), Olé Tarantula. Nice -- a totally satisfying evening. The level of energy he projects from the stage just takes my breath away.
*Wow! "Heaven" is from the early eighties -- somehow I had got fixed in my head that it was from a recent record. I think it sounds much more like late-nineties Hitchcock than do any of the other songs on "Gotta Let This Hen Out".
posted morning of July 13th, 2008: 7 responses
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