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Monday, July 28th, 2008
 Some cool graphics from our friends at IBM. (With a tip of the hat to the Luddite Robot.)
posted evening of July 28th, 2008: Respond
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No amount of sweetness today can diminish the bitterness of tomorrow.
Saramago has been telegraphing the lesson of the book -- that the public who resign themselves to the easy, isolated world of The Center, who choose for themselves/allow to be chosen for them mass-produced plastic dinnerware over Cipriano Algor's pottery, are blinding themselves to the beauty of reality in the same way as Plato's troglodytes -- pretty clearly and strongly, beginning early in the book and getting quite explicit toward the end. And that's not even a particularly new point -- it would be difficult for me to come up with names of books where I've read this kind of thing before but it seems pretty commonplace to me. So in a way, the book should seem sort of like a train wreck, grinding inexorably toward a conclusion you already know.And yet: somehow that is not at all what the experience of reading the book is like. It is not only beautifully written, it is also surprising for all you have a pretty good idea going in, what the general structure will be. When Cipriano says, "Those people are us," my impulse was to say "Well duh" -- but when he says a few sentences later, "You must decide what to do with your own lives, but I'm leaving," my reaction was one of palpable relief. Saramago has crafted his story well enough that I am included in its ups and downs almost despite myself. I'm a little torn about the ending. It has a certain Thelma & Louise quality to it that feels like it might be less true to the characters than is the rest of the novel. I see Saramago called deeply pessimistic, and there is a lot of darkness in the world of his books; but this ending is so optimistic that I would call it romantic.* And, well, in a way I guess I'm grateful to him for that. I'm glad my memory of the novel will be of Cipriano's and Marta's and Marçal's rebellion from The Center, of Cipriano's and Isaura's tears of reunion rather than of Cipriano's bleak, lonely tears. I'm not sure how this affects the philosophical message of the book though -- if the only way you can rebel from The Center is to turn to romantic fancy, how much real hope is there?
 * The ending of Blindness is also, certainly, hugely optimistic; but the darkness of Seeing keeps me from thinking of the first book as romantic.
posted evening of July 28th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, July 27th, 2008
Well this is a little surprising: in discussing the translations of The Black Book, McGaha very strongly recommends Güneli Gün's translation over Freely's later reworking. Wow! I didn't know much about Gün's translation besides that I'd heard it was unreadable -- and I know I had a lot of trouble with her translation of The Black BookThe New Life. But McGaha's recommendation, and his side-by-side comparison of the two treatments of the first paragraph, makes me want to find out more.
posted afternoon of July 27th, 2008: 2 responses
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Saturday, July 26th, 2008
So I'm reading the third chapter of Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk (which concerns The Silent House) and thinking, the family name Darvinoğlu sounds awfully familiar -- was it the name of one of the characters in The Black Book? And then I start reading the fourth chapter, which concerns The White Castle, and get to the following passage, which makes the scales fall from my eyes:
It was Don Quixote that inspired [Pamuk] to present his own novel as an old manuscript found and translated into modern Turkish; once that was decided, it occurred to him that it would be amusing to have the manuscript found in the archives at Gebze and translated by none other than Faruk Darvinoğlu, the historian of The Silent House.
Oh! So the characters I was wondering about in the winter have earlier roots. Wild -- I wish The Silent House were available in an English translation.
 McGaha also says that some critics faulted Holbrook, in her translation of The White Castle, for including the references to The Silent House without any explanation -- this seems a little weird to me. I can't see how she could have provided any explanation within the text; maybe an afterword should have been included. Doesn't seem like it would have made a huge difference in the reading experience.
posted afternoon of July 26th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, July 25th, 2008
It is not worth describing what Cipriano Algor thought about because he had thought it on so many other occasions and we have supplied more than enough information on the subject already. The only new thing here is that he allowed a few painful tears to run down his cheeks, tears that had been dammed up for a long, long time, always just about to be shed, but, as it turned out, they were being reserved for this sad hour, for this moonless night, for this solitude that has not yet resigned itself to being solitude. What was truly not a novelty, because it had happened before in the history of fables and in the history of the marvels of the canine race, was that Found went over to Cipriano Algor to lick his tears, a gesture of supreme consolation which, however touching it might seem to us, capable of touching hearts normally not given to displays of emotion, should not make us forget the crude reality that the salty taste of tears is greatly appreciated by most dogs. One thing, however, does not detract from the other, were we to ask Found if it was because of the salt that he licked Cipriano Algor's face, he would probably have replied that we do not deserve the bread that we eat, that we are incapable of seeing beyond the end of our own nose.
A dog licking tears from the face of a crying human is a central image in Saramago's work, as much as I've read of it so far anyway. And it is touching -- the other times I've read sequences like this, they have touched me as symbolizing the depth of connection between the dog and his master. But another way of looking at it that is occurring to me now, is how painfully lonely, to be weeping in a place where there is no other person present.
(The clause after "truly not a novelty" strikes me as funny in a sort of self-referential way -- it could be rendered, "What was truly not a novelty, because it had happened before in books I have written,...")
posted evening of July 25th, 2008: 4 responses
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As I was getting in my car this morning, I found I was whistling a tune, and wondered what tune it was. Aha! It is Heebie-Geebie's new song, "My Neighbor"! Excellent -- I only listened to it once and it is already in my ear. I got some issues with the first part of the verse but in sum I think it's a very fine song.
posted morning of July 25th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, July 24th, 2008
 I was moved just now to look up and see who Sylvia's new school is named after. Turns out the man was an inventor and engineer who lived in Newark, and then later in Hilton, the town which is now the easternmost neighborhood in Maplewood.
There is a statue of him in Washington Park in Newark, the little triangle of grass outside the Newark Museum -- I have seen that statue many times but never looked at the name on it. The statue was erected in the 1890's*; here is a New York Times article (PDF) from 1909, about a memorial exhibition of his tools opening at the Newark Public Library.
This carven bronze! In face and form it stands
To honor him, a son of toil so true
That from his brain and never tiring hands
Labor was crowned with dignity anew!
For him dull iron welded firmest bar,
And steam and gold gave out a secret lore,
The round sunlight beams sent him from afar,
And silver wielded best of molten ore.
We went to a picnic this evening for new Seth Boyden kids and parents. Seems like a lot of kids from Marshall are transferring over to Seth Boyden for next year!
 *Unveiled on May 14, 1890, further research reveals -- Newark's Central Labor Union boycotted the unveiling because the company that erected the memorial did not use union labor. Also: the Times obituary for Mr. Boyden (second one down), and a notice of his funeral -- their archives get pretty hard to read that far back. The Boyden homestead in Hilton burned down in 1903. (All these links are PDF's -- looks like scans of old Times microfilm.)
posted evening of July 24th, 2008: Respond
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I want to start putting together a mix tape of love songs. Seems like the right thing to do right now. Now it would be really easy to put together such a tape using only Robyn Hitchcock tunes but I don't want to roll that way... I think I will include "I Feel Beautiful" and either "Arms of Love" or "Heaven". (So many choices! My first thought was to open the mix with "Birds in Perspex" and end it with "Ride".) Anyway: time to start thinking about non-Hitchcock love songs...
posted evening of July 24th, 2008: Respond
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Dear Internets,
I have a problem, which is my young daughter was listening to my iPod
and went messing with the settings (I told her not to, but does she
listen? She does not), and set the maximum volume to quite soft. When
she was doing that, she put in a 4-digit password, which she promptly
forgot. What can i do? Google-found pages advise me that I should use
windows explorer to navigate to the iPod's "IPod Control\Device"
folder and delete the file called "volume locked" -- I did this to no
avail. (Somehow the iPod is only available via explorer while iTunes
is synching its content, then it disappears. Google also tells me
there should be a way of enabling it always to show up in Explorer but
I'm not getting anywhere with that.) I'd be happy to do a cold reboot
of the iPod if only I knew how. Pressing the Menu button and the
center button together for a few seconds appears to do a soft reboot,
and not to affect the Max Volume setting.
Help please! I want to listen to my music loud!
posted morning of July 24th, 2008: 2 responses
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Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
Sylvia comments that the King and the Duke's plan to perform a Shakespearean exhibition (featuring the balcony scene, with the King as Juliet, and the sword fight from Richard III, and the King doing Hamlet's soliloquy) reminds her a lot of Moominsummer Madness. And I think she's on to something; Jansson could very well be referring directly to this scene. That's assuming Huckleberry Finn was translated and available in Finland in the early 20th C., which seems to me like a reasonable assumption. An interesting moment was explaining to Sylvia why it would probably not be a good idea to read Huckleberry Finn out loud while we were on the airplane flying to California.
posted evening of July 23rd, 2008: 2 responses
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