READIN

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

🦋 Proof-reading

Dogs had been barking for centuries, therefore, the world was unchanged!

In general I'm just really turned on by the idea of this novel, a story about proof-reading and its consequences. Raimundo's character is seeming pretty familiar to me from Saramago's other books, I'm waiting for him to distinguish himself -- which I think will happen in his creation/telling of the history. I'm steeling myself a bit for not being convinced by Maria's character and by the relationship between the two of them -- and thinking I'd like to write a paper about weaknesses in Saramago's female characters -- but a little hopeful that he will surprise me here.

Perhaps a moment of agitation, suggested the Production Director, as if trying to be helpful. Raimundo Silva expected a predictably brusque reaction from the Editorial Director, but it did not come, and then he realised the phrase had been foreseen, there would be no dismissal, everything would end up in words, yes, no, perhaps, and the sense of relief was so overwhelming, that he could feel his body weaken, his spirit unburden...

I felt my first really strong sympathy for Raimundo at the point of his "trial," when his employers are debating how he will be disciplined. Up to here I'd been finding his character amusing and identifying with him in a sort of wry way; but here -- and in the pages leading up to this point -- I could feel his humiliation and his relief as if they were precisely my own. I'm identifying this trial as Kafkaesque though I recognize that it differs in a lot of key respects from Kafka -- the feeling of total identification with the main character's humiliation is I think what drives this.

So far I have managed to be Raimundo Silva, Splendid, now let's see if you can stay that way, for the sake of the publishing house and harmony in our future relationship. Professional, I trust you're not suggesting it could be otherwise, I was simply finishing off your phrase, the proof-reader's job is to propose solutions that will eliminate any ambiguity, either in matters of style or meaning, I presume you know that ambiguity is in the mind of the person listening or reading, Especially if the stimulus came to them from the person writing or speaking...

A lot of beauty here. This is a passage where I can see ways that the translation is coming up a little short -- I can imagine the phrasing in the original and how it would be a little more convincing (and I just checked it out against a digital copy of the original) -- alas! If only English were a little more like Portuguese! I'm appreciating it but it seems like I might not be as happy with it if I were just reading it as is, and not making allowances for its being a translation.

After R. gets home from his meeting with his employers, he turns on the TV "to keep his mind blank" and watches Leonard Cohen on a music program. I'm dying to know what songs Cohen was singing and why Saramago picked Cohen in particular.

posted afternoon of June 24th, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about The History of the Siege of Lisbon

🦋 Personæ

Clerical errors, like mirrors and fatherhood, tend to multiply creation. When I applied for my medical insurance, I gave the insurance company my date of birth and my social security number; I gave the same information to my automobile insurance company, and likewise the insurer of my life. But come to find, three different people hold these three policies, all of whom share my name.

The man who drives my car, who listens to my mix tapes in its stereo, was born a day later than I. The man who stands to be reimbursed for my hospital stays, who is the same age as I, has a social security number which if its 5th and 7th digits were transposed, would be mine; whether this is due to sloppy handwriting on my part, or a mistake in some link of the chain of transcription leading to the insurance company, I don't know. And the person against whose death I am insured -- she shares all of her vital statistics with me except for gender. Somewhere the wrong box was checked. I'll have trouble when I try to collect the benefits due me, assuming I cannot produce the particular alternate persona to whom each insurer considers itself indebted.

posted afternoon of June 24th, 2009: 2 responses
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Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

🦋 O Livro dos Conselhos

Until you attain the truth, you will not be able to amend it. But if you do not amend it, you will not attain it. Meanwhile, do not resign yourself.     - from The Book of Exhortations

Enquanto não alcançares a verdade, não poderes corrigi-la. Porém, se a não corrigires, não a alcançarás. Entretanto, não te resignes.

posted evening of June 23rd, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about José Saramago

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

🦋 Even more Saramago

Alfonso Daniels of BBC prints an interview with Saramago today -- talking among other things about The Notebook, the blog-book which will be published this month, and a new novel which will be coming out in the fall, the one he mentioned at the end of last year.

posted morning of June 22nd, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about Saramago's Notebook

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

🦋 ₰

The proof-reader said, Yes, this symbol is called deleatur, we use it when we need to supress and erase, the word speaks for itself, and serves both for separate letters and complete words, it reminds me of a snake that changes its mind just as it is about to bite its tail, Well observed, Sir, truly, for however much we may cling to life, even a snake would hesitate before eternity...

posted evening of June 21st, 2009: 4 responses
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🦋 Pitch-perfect

My initial reaction to part 2 of Life and Times of Michael K was to feel kind of let down at the change in narrative perspective -- it seemed kind of like if the the next section after Benjy's narrative in The Sound and the Fury had been told a clinician attempting to diagnose Benjy... But I warmed to it pretty quickly. It is not Michael's story, this section of the novel is the doctor's story; I could express it as a criticism of Coetzee, that he is only telling one person's story at a time, not allowing his characters to interact -- but I think this sort of solitude is part of the fabric of the universe he has built here.

As the section goes on, Coetzee seems more and more comfortable in the doctor's consciousness. This passage, from just after they've found that Michael has absconded, is full of rigor and insight and beauty:

It occurred to me that if I followed after him, proceeding down the avenue in a straight line, I could be at the beach by two o'clock. Was there any reason, I asked myself, why order and discipline should not crumble today rather than tomorrow or next month or next year? What would yield the greater benefit to mankind: if I spent the afternoon taking stock in my dispensary, or if I went to the beach and took off my clothes and lay in my underpants absorbing the benign spring sun, watching the children frolic in the water, later buying an ice-cream from the kiosk on the parking lot, if the kiosk is still there? What did Noël ultimately achieve labouring at his desk to balance the bodies out against the bodies in? Would he not be better off taking a nap? Maybe the universal sum of happiness would be increased if we declared this afternoon a holiday and went down to the beach, commandant, doctor, chaplain, PT instructors, guards, dog-handlers all together with the six hard cases from the detention block, leaving behind the concussion case to look after things. Perhaps we might meet some girls. For what reason were we waging the war, after all, but to augment the sum of happiness in the universe? Or was I misremembering, was that another war I was thinking of?

Also in this section we get (from Noël) the first mention of any concrete dates -- he is 60 years old, and he was a child "in the 1930's" -- this seems to confirm my idea that the novel is set around 1980. And again from Noël, the first mention of race in the novel, in a context that I am having a lot of trouble making any sense of: In response to the doctor's question of why they are fighting the war, he says "We are fighting this war so that minorities will have a say in their destinies." So first off, does "minorities" mean "non-white people" in South African usage? I had figured that was an American idiom -- it certainly doesn't make sense in South Africa where Boers are less than 10% of the population. And what would it mean for someone working for the South African army in 1980 to say that? I'm just confused here.

posted afternoon of June 21st, 2009: 5 responses
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Saturday, June 20th, 2009

🦋 Reasons

Between this reason and the truth that he would never announce himself, however, lay a gap wider than the distance separating him from the firelight. Always, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, into which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong.

One thing that is puzzling me a bit about this novel (halfway through) is the complete absense of race. I would have thought race and racial tension would be important factors in South Africa of the mid-to-late 20th Century; but so far there has been absolutely no mention of it, everything is class tension among characters whose race is not mentioned but I don't see how it could be other than white. I'm not quite sure what to make of this; one idea is that apartheid means the white characters have no interaction with blacks -- though my understanding was that blacks were transported from the "homelands" into white areas to work -- another possibility is that I'm reading this wrong, and the setting is not historical South Africa but a hypothetical, allegorical location.

posted evening of June 20th, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about J.M. Coetzee

🦋 I am falling, he thought.

I could live here forever, he thought, or till I die. Nothing would happen, every day would be the same as the day before, there would be nothing to say. The anxiety that belonged to the time on the road began to leave him. Sometimes, as he walked, he did not know whether he was awake or asleep. He could understand that people should have retreated here and fenced themselves in with miles and miles of silence; he could understand that they should have wanted to bequeath the privilege of so much silence to their children and grandchildren in perpetuity (though by what right he was not sure); he wondered whether there were not forgotten corners and angles and corridors between the fences, land that belonged to no one yet. Perhaps if one flew high enough, he thought, one would be able to see.

Two aircraft streaked across the sky from south to north leaving vapour trails that slowly faded, and a noise like waves.

Coetzee's epigraph for the book sounds oddly familiar, I'm sure I've heard it quoted elsewhere: "War is the father of all and king of all. Some he shows as gods, others as men. Some he makes slaves, and others free." -- Or possibly I am thinking of some other similar quotation; I think this aphorism is composed in the style of some classical writer, but I'm not sure who...

Update: the epigraph is from a fragmentary writing of Heraclitus, quoted by Hippolytus in Refutatio â…¨.

posted afternoon of June 20th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Wish list

OK, this is the post for my list of things I would love to receive as presents. Not necessarily directed at you, don't feel like I'm asking you to give me gifts -- it's more a tool for my own use, since now and then someone will ask me what I want for a birthday or similar, and it will have slipped my mind that I really wanted to own John Wesley Harding "A Bloody Show" or whatever. OTOH if you are already looking to give me a gift, well here are some things I've been thinking about.

• DVD's of John Wesley Harding "A Bloody Show" and "Wisconsin Death Trip" (or also, the book Wisconsin Death Trip.)
• León Ferrari: Obra 1976-2008 and the catalog from the Tangled Alphabets show.
• Any box sets from JSP Records.
• The book La España Negra by José Gutiérrez Solana, and/or a collection of prints of his paintings.
• The DVD of Dirt Road to Psychedelia.
• Borges Laberintos Dručmelić -- short stories by Borges illustrated with paintings by Dručmelić.
• Portable USB Turntable
• A Humument by Tom Phillips
• Purgatorio, illustrated by Dalí

That's all for now, more later as I think of them... I will store this post on my "Reading list" thread due to its list-y nature.

posted afternoon of June 20th, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about Tsundoku

🦋 Historical Background

I started reading Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K this morning. It is a dark, fascinating book, drawing me in to its violent, damaged world immediately from page 1 onward. I'm wondering a bit about the precise historical setting of the novel -- it was published in 1983 and I'm assuming without any confirmation, that it is set in the present, i.e. the late 70's or early 80's. (And Michael is 31, so would have been born around 1950.)

I realize suddenly how limited my knowledge of South African history is -- I remember as a young teenager reading in the paper and in magazines about apartheid, and thinking it was important that it should end, and self-identifying as an opponent of apartheid; but it was all pretty abstract. I did not realize that a hot civil war was being fought -- and I would not have thought of it that way prior to reading this book. But it seems from the book like at the point where the narrative starts, war is an established, ongoing state of affairs -- people are used to living in wartime.

This is the second book of Coetzee's I am reading that is not Disgrace... I went to the library this morning thinking (among other things) of checking out Disgrace; but looked at the first couple of pages and it did not really seem like what I wanted to be reading right now. (Also checked out Saramago's History of the Seige of Lisbon.)

posted afternoon of June 20th, 2009: 2 responses

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