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Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
Here are a few of the things that moved me while I was reading The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis this weekend: My dear Fernando, choose your words carefully, you put yourself at great risk of being absurd. If we do not say all words, however absurd, we will never say the essential words. This is really striking -- I can imagine it outside any novel, in big letters on the wall. Certainly a thought to revisit from time to time. (A nice justification for blogging!)
 Do you regret having written it. There is nothing more pointless in this world than regret, people who express it merely want to be forgiven, then they fall back into their weakness, for each of us, deep down, continues to take pride in his weakness. This is almost a commonplace, but I think the bit about pride renders it original. I am making no declaration of love, But you are. We are exchanging greetings, sprigs of flowers, it is true that they are pretty, I mean the flowers, but they are cut, they will soon wilt, they are unaware of this and we pretend not to notice. My flowers I place in water, and will watch them until the colors fade. Then you will not watch them long. Now I am watching you. I am no flower. You are a man, I am capable of knowing the difference. A tranquil man, who sits on a riverbank watching what the current carries past, perhaps waiting for himself to be swept away. This works extremely well as poetry, but it kind of highlights my trouble with the book, which is that the characters are not fully realized as people -- they seem like puppets mouthing this dialog. (The bit about sitting on the riverbank reminds me of Snufkin, from Jansson's Moomin series.)
↻...done
posted evening of August 19th, 2008: Respond
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BBC Radio 4 broadcast My Name is Red on its Classic Serial program -- it sounds from Gillian Reynolds' note like it was a fantastic adaptation. I didn't know about it until just now, which is too bad because you can listen to the latest episode online for a week after it airs. Hopefully they will rebroadcast it before too long, I'd love to hear it.
posted evening of August 19th, 2008: 2 responses
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Counter to prediction, I did not finish The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis this weekend. I am however moving a bit closer to writing a summing-up post. My thoughts are moving in this kind of a direction: the book is beautiful and full of powerful original thought; but I have two complaints. First is a complaint with myself; I am not equipt to understand this book. Specifically I don't know Pessoa's poetry more than a little bit; I know hardly anything about Portuguese history, classical nor modern (I didn't know until I started reading this book, that "Lusitanian" means "Portuguese", nor until I looked it up just now that that is because Lusitania was the province of the Roman empire which included modern Portugal -- this just by way of example); and I don't know enough about the history of Europe in the years leading up to the second World War. A full understanding of this book seems like it would require pretty close acquaintance with these three fields. But insofar as I do understand the book: it seems to lack the focus and intensity of Saramago's later fiction. He spends a lot of time on Reis' character but it is still cryptic to me; Reis' self-absorption seems pretty reprehensible but I don't have any window on how he justifies it to himself. And his relationships with Lydia and with Marcenda are not touching me. So but anyway: Still reading it, still loving it, with caveats. Later on this evening I will post some of the meaningful bits I've been reading and thinking about this weekend.
posted afternoon of August 19th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, August 15th, 2008
 Sorry about the lack of updates recently... someday soon I will start thinking about posting blog entries! I am loving Ricardo Reis, I think I will finish it this weekend, not sure what I will read next.
I am nearly done fixing READIN to be compatible with HostMonster, still just a couple of things to do -- like I can't post "What's of Interest" items on the sidebar, or update the blogroll, at least not consistently.* Timeline for finishing this is Tuesday, when I will have some free time and Internet access.
We are going away for a long weekend, to a place without Internet or even much of a cellular network -- and yet it is nearby! in northern Bucks County, PA -- and spend a few days relaxing. See you Tuesday!
* If I could do these things, I would have: Added A History of New York to the blogroll, under "Literati"; updated Matthew Yglesias' link to point to his new site; posted an "of Interest" item that today is the anniversary of the Beatles' Shea Stadium concert. Without arena rock, we would not have Kansas, Styx, REO Speedwagon! Also, I would add a link under "Comix" to Bad Gods, which I see is publishing again.
↻...done
posted morning of August 15th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, August 14th, 2008
For several minutes he watched his courage desert him, it was like watching sand run through an hourglass, an overworked metaphor which nevertheless keeps recurring. One day, when we live two hundred years and ourselves become the hourglass observing the sand inside it, we will not need the metaphor, but life is too short to indulge in such thoughts...
This chapter, in which Ricardo's relationship with Marcenda moves a little closer to passion and Ricardo's relationship with Lydia moves a little closer to being taken for granted, has me wondering, why are all of the characters' actions so clearly marked as male or as female. Ricardo walking around Lisbon and around his room is identified as male -- "It is indeed true that a man on his own is useless" -- Lydia is identified as having a woman's eye (more specifically a female domestic servant's eye) for what needs to be cleaned up in Ricardo's room -- the nameless people in the rooms and buildings around them are doing things as husbands, wives, fathers, mothers.I've been noticing all along that gender plays a very important role in this narrative; fortuitously I read a post today at Is there no sin in it? which touched on the subject of "gender performance," how characters on TV shows act out their genders. I'd heard the term before but this was a very useful reminder -- it gives me a name for the way the characters in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis are being depicted. I believe tentatively that gender performance, possibly interlocking with performance of Portuguese identity and of social class, is a major part of the meaning of this novel.
There are things we do automatically, our body, acting on its own, avoids inconvenience whenever possible, that is why we sleep on the eve of battle or execution, and why ultimately we die when we can no longer bear the harsh light of existence.
(Well, and to be sure there is a lot more going on than just gender or just gender and class and ethnicity.)
posted evening of August 14th, 2008: Respond
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I was happy this afternoon to get pointed toward Bryan Waterman and Cyrus Patell's blog, A History of New York. Waterman and Patell are English professors at NYU and are writing a cultural history of New York City; the blog is a record of their circumambulations as they write it. Good stuff!
posted afternoon of August 14th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
OK, the new machinery is now active. READIN is now hosted by HostMonster. Comments don't seem to work yet nor does the RSS feed; these too will come.
 OK, comments are working...
posted evening of August 13th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
 Outage this weekend can be laid at the door of my ISP. Now I'm thinking strongly about moving the site out of my house, onto Dreamhost or some such. Recommendations welcomed -- the things I need are MySql, PHP, and ssh access.
(Service is still kind of slow and/or occasionally nonexistent. A new ISP is in the offing, a new hosting service also: changing ISP's means no more fixed IP address for my house. But it ultimately makes way more sense to use a remote hosting service anyway.)
posted morning of August 12th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, August 11th, 2008
I have been taking a look back at Borges' fictions over the last few days -- very quickly I am again remembering what I love about them, and also seeing some problems with them that I was not conscious of in college. Jorge López' objection that they are "lacking in the emotional area" is particularly on my mind; I must say that the stories in part II, "Artifices," seem more emotionally developed than the stories in part I, "The Garden of Forking Paths." The last line of "The Form of the Sword" really cuts deep on an emotional level. (And yes, I seem to remember liking part I better than part II when I was in college. Make of that what you will.)
I have been reading Ficciones in the 1962 Grove edition, with translations by Anthony Kerrigan, Aleister Reed, Anthony Bonner, and a few others. I'm seeing some issues with the translations and thinking this could probably be a lot better done -- then I see over at Orbis Tertius today, there is a more recent translation by Andrew Hurley, published in 1998. So, I should check that out sometime.
 I've also been happy about catching references that I did not get in college -- for instance, in "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" I recognized the title character's name from the op-ed piece I linked on Friday, and knew about "The Colloquy of the Birds" from references to it in Pamuk.
posted evening of August 11th, 2008: 2 responses
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I'm seeing a lot of tropes in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis that will be repeated and magnified in Saramago's later work. For instance about halfway through the book Reis and Lydia (who are having an affair) have been talking for a little while, and Reis says,
...All I know about you is that you live here in the hotel, that you go out on your days off, that you are single and unattached as far as one can see, What could be better, Lydia retorted, and with these four words she wrung the heart of Ricardo Reis. It is banal to say so, but that is precisely how they affected him... We could go on in this manner multiplying words, adding them to the four already spoken, What could be better.... Lydia is about to leave, a clear indication of not having spoken at random. Certain phrases may seem spontaneous, a thing of the moment, but God alone knows what millstone ground them, what invisible sieve filtered them, so that when pronounced they ring like judgements of Solomon. The best one could hope for now is silence, or that one of the two interlocutors should depart, but people usually go on talking and talking, until what was for a moment definitive and irrefutable is completely lost.
-- And from here the conversation goes on, until what was definitive is lost. This seems to me to speak to Randolph's observations about the dialog in The Cave, that its realism stems from its fallibility and lack of direction. Saramago is laying out his thoughts about how conversation works, which will support his constructions of conversations in his later work.
I am curious about where Saramago is going with the developing conflict within Reis, opposing Lydia and his earthy affection for her to Marcenda and his more cerebral attraction to her. The archetypal nature of this conflict is pretty superficially clear -- the narrator even mentions at one point, Marcenda is understood to be a virgin, and has Reis wondering whether he should pay Lydia -- but it's hard for me to see how it will add to the story and to the characters Saramago is describing. (As I write "more cerebral" I think Hm, that's not quite what I mean -- the distinction is not really between "earthy" and "cerebral" but rather class-based. Reis is socially above Lydia but in the same class as Marcenda. Lydia is attainable but not an appropriate match. I was trying to think of Reis' attraction to Marcenda as similar to Dante's attraction to Beatrice, but that is probably not going to be a productive line of thought.)
posted morning of August 11th, 2008: Respond
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