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Tuesday, March third, 2009
This evening was the first meeting of the 6-week intermediate Spanish class I am taking at the local Adult School. I feel ambivalent about it -- I wonder if it's going to teach me anything I don't already know. Probably not -- what I really need is practice speaking and listening, and most of what I'm going to get in that class will be reading aloud, on a much lower level than what I already know how to read aloud. What I ought to be doing is having conversations with Spanish speakers I know -- this is where I run into the root problem, which is that I'm just generally not a very talkative guy. I was wondering this evening whether the deep longing I've always felt to learn to speak new languages is not at root a longing just to be better at speaking, to have words come more readily, to feel like I have interesting things to say.
posted evening of March third, 2009: 7 responses
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Saramago is looking back on writing the epigraph for Blindness: Si puedes mirar, ve.
Si puedes ver, repara.
I wrote this for Blindness, already a good couple of years ago. Now, when the film based on this novel is making its debut in Spain, I've encountered the phrase printed on the bags of the 8½ bookstore and on the inside front cover of Fernando Meirelles' making-of book, which this same bookstore's publishing arm has edited with skill. At times I have said that by reading the epigraph of any of my novels, one will already know the whole thing. Today, I don't know why, seeing this, I too felt a sudden impulse, felt the urgency of repairing, of fighting against the blindness. [links are my additions -- J]
I'm curious about how to translate that epigraph. (And surprised that I don't remember this epigraph from when I read Blindness, and annoyed that I cannot go check how Pontiero translated it, because I lent it to a friend...) The sense of it is, "If you can see, see. If you can see, repair." -- Obviously this does not sound good in English because the distinction between mirar and ver is missing, and the transitive structure is lost. The literal translation of the first sentence would be "If you can look, see" -- but I'm guessing the sense of Si puedes mirar is something more like "if you are able to see", i.e. if you are not blind. It seems like ve has a more transitive sense, "see something, some injustice" (although the object is omitted, as it is with repara) -- where mirar is intransitive.
 (There is an important misreading in this post, as regards the verb reparar -- see later post for the correction.)
posted evening of March third, 2009: 4 responses
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 56 years old today and absolutely in his prime musically.
posted afternoon of March third, 2009: Respond
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A fegmaniac recommended this mix tape the other day -- I was intrigued by the mention of Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, and thought I'd check it out. Well I'm back to report: it's all right, and you ought to take a listen. Most of the songs are standards; some of performances are highly unconventional. I was really taken aback at the opening of Musee Mecanique's performance of "I Ain't Got No Home In This World Anymore" -- the pipe organ seemed totally counter to the spirit of that song. But by the end it had won me over. There are interesting shades of meaning in experiencing that political song as a purely æsthetic phenomenon -- a truly beautiful one. The haunting vocal in Headlights' "Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies" is going to stay with me for a while. Some of the straight "folk music" performances are not as interesting, but they serve nicely to leaven the weirdness of the other tracks.
posted morning of March third, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, March first, 2009
Saramago recommends as "one of the most skilled and original" of Portugal's new generation of novelists, Gonçalo M. Tavares. Doesn't look like Sr. Tavares has any works published in English yet (this might be wrong -- his translations page lists rights for most of his works having already been bought for "English in India only" -- but it's not clear that those translations have been published) but definitely someone to keep an eye out for. When he received the Saramago Prize in 2005, Saramago said "Jerusalém is a great book, and truly deserves a place among the great works of Western literature. Gonçalo M. Tavares has no right to be writing so well at the age of 35. One feels like punching him!"
posted evening of March first, 2009: 5 responses
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For a long time I was relying on HTML named entities for my accented characters -- whenever I needed to type é, I would enter in é. This works fine (as long as you're just composing web pages) but can get to be a pain, especially if you want/need to quote a passage in (say) Spanish. Well a few weeks ago I finally did the research for figuring out how to use alternate keyboard layouts -- turns out it's quite easy to enable "U.S. International" layout, which serves most of my typing needs. (Though it takes a little getting used to, always hitting space-bar after ", when I need to type a quotation mark rather than an umlaut.) The keyboard layouts I have enabled now are: - U.S. International -- this is my default layout.
- Turkish Q -- there are two Turkish layouts, "Q" is the easier to use. For next time I am reading Pamuk or similar, and need to type characters like "ğ" and "ı".
- U.S. Pinyin -- I downloaded this from neveroddoreven -- in case my dormant study of Mandarin picks back up.
If you want to enable U.S. International layout in Windows, follow the instructions at Microsoft's web site. Other layouts, the steps to follow are parallel -- Googling the name of the layout will generally get you a page with a keyboard diagram.
 (Hm, and Greek Polytonic seems like a useful layout to have enabled as well...)
posted morning of March first, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, February 28th, 2009
Borges categorizes 5 of Poe's stories as detective stories, I just wanted to list them with links to sources: If I'm reading him correctly, he thinks that detective stories are spoiled if you know the solution going in*, and that Poe's stories have been spoilt because we all know how they're going to turn out. But this solution [the end of "Murders in the Rue Morgue"] is not a solution for us, because we all know the outcome prior to reading Poe. This, of course, takes away much of its power....
Not sure how to react to this -- I think I remember being surprised by the ending of "Murders in the Rue Morgue", which I read as a child; but it was so many years ago, I could be wrong. Borges goes ahead in the next sentence and spoils the ending for any of his listeners who do not already know it, which seems a little mean-spirited.
* This is a little curious taken side-by-side with his assertion in "The Book", that re-reading is more important than reading -- it seems like an inescapable conclusion from these two statements, that detective fiction is not important literature...
posted afternoon of February 28th, 2009: Respond
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I'm trying to understand what Borges thought of Poe -- there are different, and conflicting, levels of his opinion to take into account. As I said yesterday, he is pretty dismissive of the poems and stories themselves -- he spends a few pages addressing Poe's detective stories one by one, and none of them comes off very well. But he still believes Poe to be a genius, and one of the most important authors influencing modern literature.
I have said, Poe was the creator of an intellectual temperament in literature. What happened after Poe's death? He died, I believe in 1849. Whitman, his other great contemporary, penned an obituary* of him, saying that Poe was a performer who only knew how to play the low notes of the piano, who did not represent American democracy -- a claim which Poe had never made for himself. Whitman did him an injustice, and so did Emerson.There are critics, today, who underestimate him. But I believe that Poe, if we take his works in aggregate, has the œuvre of a genius, even if his stories (excepting the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) are defective. Nonetheless, taken together they construct a character, a character more vividly present than the characters he created, more vividly present than Charles Auguste Dupin, than the crimes, than the mysteries which fail to scare us.
This seems to be his final judgement of Poe -- the rest of the lecture he spends discussing the flourishing of the detective story in Britain and its abasement in the US. So he gives Poe credit for inventing a genre, for inventing a style of reading, for inventing Borges himself -- at one point he says "we ourselves" read differently by virtue of having Poe's invention as part of our heritage. I guess he believes Poe to be a literary genius but not a great author.
 * I haven't been able to find the source for this obituary on the web. Update -- found it!
posted afternoon of February 28th, 2009: 3 responses
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
As I read this lecture I'm beginning to think that Borges does not really think that much of Poe as a writer -- interesting because he says (as I noted below) that Poe changed the course of the history of literature, that Poe invented a genre and a manner of reading hugely important in our time. Of Poe as a poet, Borges says we have "a much lesser Tennyson"; he quotes Emerson in calling Poe a "jingleman." There is a hugely entertaining two-page digression in which Borges imagines the process of writing "The Raven," which is by itself worth the price of admission. Of his prose, Borges says he is "more extraordinary in the aggregate of his work, in our memory of his work, than in any of the pages of his work."
Update: I found what might be the original reference for Emerson calling Poe "the jingle man" -- the May 20, 1894 edition of the NY Times, under the headline "Emerson's Estimate of Poe" (only available as PDF) quotes the April 1894 Blackwood's Magazine: "Whom do you mean?" asked Emerson with an astonished stare, and on the name being repeated with extreme distinctness, "Ah, the jingle man!" returned Emerson, with a contemptuous reference to the "refrains" in Poe's sad lyrics.
Update II: Fixed a blunder in my translation -- I had omitted a phrase ("in the aggregate of his work") that changes the sense of the quotation.
posted evening of February 27th, 2009: 2 responses
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Thursday, February 26th, 2009
Borges starts out by talking about how one reads detective stories.
To think is to generalize; we need the useful archetypes of Plato to be able to make any claim. So: why shouldn't we affirm that there are literary genres? I will add a personal observation: literary genres depend, perhaps, less on the texts themselves than on the manner in which they are read. The æsthetic fact requires a conjunction of reader and text; only then does it exist. It is absurd to suppose that a volume is anything more than a volume. It starts to exist when the reader opens the volume. Then the æsthetic phenomenon comes into existence, which could be imagined from the moment when the book was engendered.
And there is an actual type of reader, the reader of detective fiction. This reader -- this reader whom we encounter in every country of the world and who numbers in the millions -- was brought into being by Edgar Allen Poe. Let us suppose that this reader did not exist -- or let's suppose something perhaps more interesting, that we are dealing with a person far removed from ourselves. He could be a Persian, a Malay, a hayseed, a kid -- some person whom we tell that the Quixote is a detective novel; let us suppose that this hypothetical person has read detective novels, and he begins reading the Quixote. So how is he going to read it?
Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, not long ago there lived a gentleman... and already this reader is filled with suspicions, for the reader of detective novels is a skeptical reader, suspicious, particularly suspicious.
For example, when he reads: Somewhere in la Mancha..., of course he supposes that this did not take place in la Mancha. Then: ...whose name I do not care to remember..., -- why does Cervantes not care to remember? Without a doubt because Cervantes is the murder[er], is at fault. Then, ...not long ago...; it may be that what has already happened is not as terrifying as the future.
The first two paragraphs of this passage seem just fantastic to me (given that I didn't think there was any real need in the first place, to defend the legitimacy of talking about genre) -- the idea that literary genre is determined by an interaction between the reader and the text has a whole lot of room for interesting stuff to com out of it. The idea that Edgar Allen Poe created the reader of detective stories is a nice little nugget of thought. And the thought experiment of reading Don Quixote as a detective story is a great idea, of course bringing to mind Borges' story about Pierre Menard. But when he embarks on the experiment, he goes off on the wrong track. The suspicions that Borges attributes to the reader of detective fiction are suspicions about the intent of the narrator, of the author of the Quixote. But the unreliable narrator does not belong to the detective story, and suspicion of him does not belong to the detective story reader; Laurence Sterne predates Poe by a hundred years, and he did not invent the unreliable narrator. (If memory serves, for that matter, the narrator of the actual Quixote is himself not particularly reliable.*) It's been a while since I read any genre detective stories, but the way I recall reading them is being suspicious of the characters and the ways they presented themselves; the narrator (speaking here of stories in the third person or narrated by the detective, and not considering the Raymond Chandler branch of the genre) did not lie, though he might fail to disclose valuable information or might himself be deceived.
So, there's my quibble with this lecture -- which I have not read in full yet. This reading a language I do not understand seems to really point me in the direction of reading closely, at least...
...Looking ahead, some really great stuff in the body of this lecture. Stay tuned, I'll try and write more this evening. Borges thinks the two authors "without whom literature would not be what it is today" are Poe and Whitman.
* I mean to say, it seems completely natural to wonder why Cervantes does not care to remember the place where his novel begins -- but it's not because I suspect Cervantes of being the guilty party, and I don't believe it's because I have read detective stories. I wonder if a 17th-Century reader would have this reaction -- it's hard for me to imagine any other way of reacting to that sentence.
posted evening of February 26th, 2009: 11 responses
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