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Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
It's a good day for a new president. Some nice Inauguration Day posts elsewhere:
If you've got any other good links, please leave them in comments.
posted morning of January 20th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, January 19th, 2009
The excellent movie we watched yesterday evening was The Crime of Padre Amaro -- not much to say about it other than it was a great movie, I recommend it highly -- I am thinking about it right now while reading Of Love and Other Demons's description* of a highly religious (and seemingly to me, sincerely so) bishop, and contrasting this with the hideous portrait of the bishop who appoints and conspires with Amaro:
"Come in, Ygnacio," he said. "My house is yours."The Marquis wiped his perspiring hands on his trousers, walked through the door, and found himself under a canopy of yellow bellflowers... The Bishop extended his soldier's hand in a meaningful way, and the Marquis kissed his ring. Asthma made his breathing heavy and stony, and his phrases were interrupted by inopportune sighs and a harsh, brief cough, but nothing could affect his elopuence. He established an immediate, easy exchange of trivial commonplaces. Sitting across from him, the Marquis was grateful for this consolatory preamble, so rich and protracted that they were taken aback when the bells tolled five. More than a sound, it was a vibration that made the afternoon light tremble and filled the sky with startled pigeons. "It is horrible," said the Bishop. "Each hour resonates deep inside me like an earthquake. The phrase surprised the Marquis, for he had responded with the same thought at four o'clock. It seemed a natural coincidence to the Bishop. "Ideas do not belong to anyone," he said. With his index finger he sketched a series of continuous circles in the air and concluded: "They fly around up there like angels."
So -- in a sense he seems detached in a monklike way (or a way that I think of in association with monks and ascetics) from ownership of the world around him -- and earlier he was described as "sincere in his poverty." My initial reaction to that is wait, but he's not poor, he lives in a mansion with his needs attended to, and to think about the Church in a villainous context. But then I find a very sympathetic portrait of the Bishop. (Initially at any rate -- the character has just been introduced. Who knows, what the story will bring -- and see update below.)
 A line in the movie that gave me pause was when Padre Benito said to Amaro, in regards to its being unimaginable that the Vatican would ever drop the requirement of celibacy from the priesthood, that "there will sooner be a Mexican Pope." Huh! Well I can't offhand think of a non-European Pope and I reckon there probably has never been one from Mexico or Latin America. I would not have thought of it as a basis for comparison -- of course I am neither Latin American nor Catholic. Is this exclusion a common point of reference? Or is it being used as a common point of reference among Churchmen -- to emphasize that Benito and Amaro are priests and are concerned with Church politics? (Here is an article from Pacific News Service on the need for a non-European Pope, dated 2005.)
(Update: Hm, well García Márquez' depiction of the Bishop very quickly takes on a negative cast -- a few pages after we meet him he is proposing exorcism of a rabies patient and implying it's all down to the Jews. This is at least a different failing from greed or hypocrisy...)
* And besides this: the number and frequency of points of similarity between the movie and the book are making me wonder if there was conscious imitation going on, either on the part of the movie makers or on García Márquez' part with reference to the novel that was source for the film, which dates from 1875.
posted afternoon of January 19th, 2009: Respond
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...which doesn't have the same negative connotation for me that it does for other people... At Presentation Zen, an excellent slide show from Scott McCloud. Reminds me a bit of "Swimming to Cambodia" -- the addition of illustrations to his monologue plays really well.(via The Wooster Collective)
A higher-resolution copy is available from the TED site. During the talk Scott scrolls through Drew Weing's "Pup Contemplates the Heat-Death of the Universe", viewable here.
posted afternoon of January 19th, 2009: Respond
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I had my first-ever His Dark Materials-based dream last night! Can't remember it other than that it was extremely involved and plotted out in detail. I did not have a dæmon, most of the people I interacted with did, so I'm guessing I was a person from this world who had passed through into Lyra's world. (Note: Is Will's world "this world," the world of the reader? It certainly seems to be -- nothing about it seems unfamiliar, in the limited view of it we have gotten.) Many characters from the books were in the dream but interestingly they were all adult characters, where the main characters of the books are children. That reminded me of something I had been meaning to write about The Subtle Knife -- I don't remember this being the case as much in The Golden Compass* -- which is that there's just a ton of exposition. I haven't been keeping track exactly, but so far there have been at least three occasions of a character speaking for multiple pages, narrating the story-so-far to another character and, obviously, to the reader. Not sure what to make of this -- some of the narration is filling in needed plot points, some of it is confirming stuff I had already figured out from reading the book-so-far... I had a thought that maybe this was "because HDM is children's lit" -- that the intended audience won't have made all the connections, so Pullman is bringing them out explicitly. Maybe that's right, I don't know -- I'm finding it a bit of a distraction.
* (Just remembered one instance of this in The Golden Compass -- it was integrated really nicely into the story there, where these feel a bit more patched-on.)
posted morning of January 19th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 17th, 2009
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Apostropher's got some tunes up for celebrating the inaugural. (2 more days! Bye-bye, Bush! Hope you get what's coming to you!)
posted evening of January 17th, 2009: Respond
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Coincident with my interest in learning to read and understand Spanish, I find that I'm reading a little differently these past few weeks, more sensually and in a less plot-directed way. (This may also have a lot to do with What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?, which in its strangeness has sort of knocked me for a loop...) This is nice because it makes me able to listen to recordings of spoken and sung Spanish which I understand only in a very limited sense, and get the cadences and flow without knocking myself out about the meaning. And I'm finding that I can get a similar thing going with English, of course I understand the meaning of it much better, but I can focus on the sound of the text and the visual/sensual qualities of the scene, rather than on characters and plot, which have been my main focus over the last few years. Today I started rereading Garcia Marquez' Of Love and Other Demons (tr. Edith Grossman), and this is a fantastic book for sensual reading. I'm taking it slow, reading it like poetry -- glad I picked it up. Take a look at the first paragraph for a sense of the story's lushness:
An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians' stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path. Three of them were black slaves. The fourth, Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles, the only child of the Marquis de Casalduero, had come there with a mulatta servant to buy a string of bells for the celebration of her twelfth birthday.
A few notes about it: The epigraph is from the supplement to Part III of Aquinas' Summa Theologica, Question 80: Article 2, which addresses whether hair and fingernails will be resurrected along with the rest of the human body. Huh, I thought as I read this, that's a strange subject -- Garcia Marquez explains in a note at the front of the text, how this book got started. In 1949, as a reporter for El Universal in Cartagena, he covered the destruction of the historic Convent of Santa Clara and the disinterment of the bodies in its graveyard. One of the bodies was a young girl's, and yards of red hair were growing from its skull -- the grave marker said "Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles," and he associated this name with a folk tale he had heard from his grandmother about a girl who died of rabies and was credited with miracles. So 45 years later, in 1994, Garcia Marquez wrote a novel about a red-haired girl of that name dying of rabies. This is an interesting take on historical fiction -- mixing history and myth/folklore freely and without apology.
 (Note that the author's note is part of the fiction, like the dedication of The White Castle -- I wonder though what part of it is true. I'm assuming with no proof that it is true except for the detail about the red hair.)
posted afternoon of January 17th, 2009: 2 responses
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I've been listening a lot to Disc B of the Mountain Blues box set from JSP Records -- there is a ton of great music on this disc and in this set, including many fiddle tunes that I want to learn. Plus a song I'm finding particularly interesting, and different from most everything else on this set: Bread Line Blues (1931), by Slim Smith. There doesn't seem to be any biographical information on Smith that I can find, either in the notes to the box set or on the Internets. His singing style reminds me a lot of Woody Guthrie; I'm pretty poor at recognizing accents, so I won't venture to guess where he's from -- most of the other artist on the set are from Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, the Carolinas. The song is basically a plea to vote Democratic in 1932. I'm interested in finding out some of the subtext -- I don't know a whole lot about the history of the Great Depression beyond generalities. I understand that Hoover, a Republican, was blamed for the economic collapse, and clearly the song says "vote Democratic to get the economy back on course." But I'm very intrigued by the lines, "If we had states' rights,/ I'll leave it to you,/ We could all have fun/ And better home-brew." If I heard someone in say, 1960 or later, invoking "states' rights," I'd assume he was speaking in code about resentment over desegregation, and appealing to memories of Southern separatism -- this is a major part of the theme of Nixonland. But I don't believe desegregation was even on the radar in 1931. It sounds from the verse like the resentment is against prohibition, and maybe more generally against federal regulation of distillation. But presumably memories of Southern separatism would have been fresher in 1931 than they were in the '60s; so maybe that is coming through as well. I'm also pretty interested by this verse: "It's the rich man's job/ To make some rules,/ To rid me of/ These Bread Line Blues." What is the ideology here? The first time I heard the song I started out thinking I was listening to a Socialist after the manner of Woody Guthrie, advocating for FDR and the New Deal; but this verse makes no sense in that context -- it sounds more to me like what I think of as Republicanism, and it surprises me to hear a Democrat saying it. But obviously party boundaries and ideologies are fluid. Oh and another neat thing: the Donkey and Elephant party mascots make their appearances. How old are these symbols? Aha! finally a question I can answer with Google: the animals date to 1874, to a political cartoon by Thomas Nast.
posted afternoon of January 17th, 2009: 3 responses
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Sylvia gets her moment in the spotlight! The News-Record photographer came into her school last week and took a few shots of her lunchtime knitting club -- here she is working with a couple of friends.
posted morning of January 17th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, January 16th, 2009
 Yeah, that's about how I feel too... Sorry about the light posting this week, maybe when Bush is out of Washington my head will be a little more together...
posted morning of January 16th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
Argentine author Sergio Chejfec, whose Mis dos Mundos was recommended by Enrique Vila-Matas as one of the best books he read in 2008, will be reading from the translation My Two Worlds in NYC Thursday the 29th, two weeks from tomorrow. His translator Liz Werner will also be there; this is Chejfec's first book to appear in English. The event is a party for the 10th anniversary of BOMB Magazine. If you're coming, drop me a line. (via 3%.)
 Update: A misreading -- Chejfec's translator is Margaret Carson.
posted morning of January 14th, 2009: Respond
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