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Friday, February 20th, 2009
Sylvia and I read Chapter 18 of The Amber Spyglass tonight, in which Lyra and Will enter the world of the dead; and I found myself utterly blown away by Pullman's creativity. There has been a lot to love about this series of books; but I think the transition here from the multiple universes of living reality to the world of the dead might be the single greatest bit of genius so far. It's believable and elegant and not kitsch, it seems like Dante writing science fiction. -- Wait no, that's not quite what I mean; I mean something more like "a great science fiction author writing the Inferno." Sylvia impressed me last night when we were reading about Mary Malone among the mulefa, by picking up on the fact that what Mary was building was going to be "the amber spyglass" -- she figured this out before I did.
posted evening of February 20th, 2009: 2 responses
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Of all the diverse tools of man, the most astonishing is, without a doubt, the book.
At the library today I found a lovely little book by Jorge Luis Borges -- it is called Borges oral and is the texts of five lectures Borges gave at the Universidad Belgrano, in Buenos Aires, in the 70's. The topics are "The Book", "Immortality", "Emmanuel Swedenborg", "The Detective Story", and "Time" -- Borges says he "chose topics with which I have occupied my time."The first lesson is very engaging and fun -- he's talking about how people have looked at the book throughout history, what space it has occupied in cultures, with reference to classical philosophy and to the Old Testament; and to Spengler's Decline of the West. Some of this is over my head but Borges has composed it in such a way as to welcome inquiry -- he is not assuming his students will understand the references but rather that they will be prompted to investigate further. Very nice to think about the aged author (in his 70s at the time he delivered these lectures) addressing the class. I am wondering now whether these lectures were ever recorded...
posted evening of February 20th, 2009: 3 responses
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Thursday, February 19th, 2009
Saramago writes today about Paco Ibáñez, and links to his web site --
Tomorrow, Saturday, Paco Ibáñez will sing at Argelès-sur-mer, on the coast of Provence, in homage to the memory of the Spanish republicans, among others his father, who there suffered torments, humiliations, evil treatment of all kinds, in the concentration camp erected by the French authorities.
Argelès-sur-mer is a village very close to the Pyrenees (about 10 miles north of Cerbère); in the final years of the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of republicans were interned there.
posted evening of February 19th, 2009: Respond
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Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness.Fernando Pessoa, Book of Disquiet
It makes me kind of happy, as Gregorius is browsing through Simões' bookshop (in Chapter 8 of Night Train to Lisbon), to see how many of the titles and authors I recognize -- this is starting from slightly more than a year ago, when José Saramago was broadly speaking, the first Portuguese author I had ever heard of. The amount of reading I've done in this literature is still pretty sparse; but I've gotten a chance to familiarize myself with the names and identities of a lot of the important touchstones, it looks like.
I said before that I was not really identifying with Gregorius, and that's still true -- I was thinking tonight though, it's funny I don't -- some aspects of his situation have parallels to aspects of my own life, I think; seems like if I tried, I ought to be able to put myself in his shoes. And curious -- in the last book I read, Elizabeth Costello, I also found that I was not "relating" to the text that way. My feeling about this is that both Coetzee and Mercier have a very different type of voice -- at a first approximation, "more cerebral" -- than much of what I've been reading in the last few years. It could also be that I'm moving in a different direction as a reader. This is difficult to quantify; I'm just going to leave it out there for the time being.
posted evening of February 19th, 2009: Respond
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For some reason I had been operating under the assumption that Night Train to Lisbon was Pascal Mercier's first novel. That is not true, it's his third (following Perlmann's Silence and The Piano Tuner; and he has a fourth novel, Lea) -- however it's his first and so far only work to appear in English translation.  Writing under his real name, Peter Bieri also has two philosophical texts, Time and Experience of Time and The Handicraft of Freedom, and a paper "What Remains of Analytical Philosophy?" I've been sort of keeping in mind, as I read this book, that the author is a philosopher. That is making me look for philosophical argument underlying the text -- I'm not sure how valid this is as an approach to the book, it could quite possibly make me miss the forest for the trees.
posted afternoon of February 19th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Robyn Hitchcock was on BBC Radio 4's Material World last Thursday, on Darwin's birthday -- the show does not usually feature live music, but they marked the occasion with Robyn singing "We Evolve". What you call God
I call evolution.
What you call fate
I call mum and dad.
They drive you mad... Download the podcast from the BBC -- music begins about 15 minutes in.
posted evening of February 18th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. Buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its color, its melody. Then, when we turn to these treasures, as archæologists of the soul, we discover how confusing they are. The object of contemplation refuses to stand still, the words bounce off the experience and in the end, pure contradictions stand on the paper. For a long time, I thought it was a defect, something to be overcome. Today I think it is different: that recognition of the confusion is the ideal path to understanding these intimate yet enigmatic experiences. That sounds strange, even bizarre, I know. But ever since I have seen the issue in this light, I have the feeling of being really awake and alive for the first time."That's the introduction," said the bookdealer and started leafing through it. "And now he seems to begin, passage after passage, to dig for all the buried experiences. To be the archæologist of himself. Some passages are several pages long and others are quite short. Here, for example, is a fragment that consists of only one sentence." He translated: Given that we live only a small part of what there is in us -- what happens with the rest?
Aha! No wonder Night Train to Lisbon has been seeming familiar in structure to me -- it is built on a similar foundation to The White Castle. It is going to be way less cryptic though, a third-person narration and we have access to the Book that Gregorius is reading. (I wonder how it is going to work out, for Gregorius not to understand Portuguese?)* This is going to be fun...
 * Ah: he is buying a Portuguese textbook.
posted evening of February 17th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, February 16th, 2009
Drawn! links to a collection of children's dreams with illustration and narrative: El Monstruo de Colores no tiene Boca. (Thanks for sharing this, badger!)
posted evening of February 16th, 2009: 4 responses
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A passage from Night Train to Lisbon that has me thinking about AWB's post about relating to texts -- it's an interesting sentiment and I'm trying to figure out what kind of person would hew to it. Not something I can imagine myself believing. Spanish -- that was her territory. It was like Latin and completely different from Latin, and that bothered him. It went against his grain that words in which Latin was so present came out of contemporary mouths -- on the streeet, in the supermarket, in the café. That they were used to order Coke, to haggle and to curse. He found the idea hard to bear and brushed it aside quickly and violently whenever it came. Naturally, the Romans had also haggled and cursed. But that was different. He loved the Latin sentences because they bore the calm of everything past. Because they didn't make you say something. Because they were speech beyond talk. And because they were beautiful in their immutability. Dead languages -- people who talked about them like that had no idea, really no idea, and Gregorius could be harsh and unbending in his contempt for them. When Florence spoke Spanish on the phone, he shut the door. That offended her and he couldn't explain it to her.
Sort of a romantic view of languages and of classicism. I'm really liking Mercier's composition, and Barbara Harshav's translation. I haven't found any entry point for self-identification -- for "relating" -- with the text yet; but it is still very early in the book.
posted evening of February 16th, 2009: 4 responses
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Some of the most moving writing at Saramago's blog has been about the plight of immigrants attempting to reach Europe (or the Canaries) from Africa. Today he writes about a group whose boat capsized almost within reach of safety: At the door in Lanzarote, at the house door which, if fortune helps, maybe will come to be the door of the new house. Twenty meters from the coast, on the Teguise Coast, when certainly laughter and words of happiness have already been exchanged at having succeeded in reaching the good port, the boat has tipped. They have crossed the hundred kilometers which separate the island from the coast of Africa, and end up dying twenty meters from salvation. Of the more than thirty immigrants whom extreme necessity obliged to confront the dangers of the sea, for the most part young men and teenagers, twenty-four were drowned, among them a pregnant woman and some children of few years. Six were saved thanks to the valor and selflessness of two surfers who hurled themselves into the water and freed them from a death which, without their intervention, would have been inevitable.
This is, in the most simple and direct words I have been able to find, the square story [?] of what has happened here. I do not know what more I could possibly say. Today words fail me and only emotion remains. Until when?
Here is a recommendation: watch the video I've linked to. It attempts a style which others have used on YouTube, that of a magnificent program about the drama of immigration, which Marisa Márquez has directed on Spanish TV. The fragment which is circulating on the Internet is owing to the intervention of Pilar, who sympathized with the victims and pointed out those responsible.
Video is at the link. CNN reports the story here; they say 19 were drowned rather than 24. I am unsure about some of this translation -- the first sentence is a little shaky and "the square story of what has happened here" is a total guess. But I think it is sufficient to get the idea of the post across.
posted evening of February 16th, 2009: Respond
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