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Monday, January 26th, 2009
David Goldblatt writes in last Sunday's Times an account of picking up the pieces after his widowed father was stabbed to death in 2001. The paperwork first arrived in plastic sacks, and putting it into some kind of order had helped. It felt like an act of salvage. That was the easy bit; then it stopped helping. My partner, Sarah, said: "Are you sure you want to open the boxes? You know what happens when you open the boxes... and... I just wonder if it's helping any more."
Goldblatt's story of sorting and reading through his father's papers is really gripping and gave me a feeling of intimacy with both the father and the son. Well worth the reading. (Link via the Apostropher.)
posted evening of January 26th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, January 25th, 2009
Tonight Sylvia and I started in on the final book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. Just at the outset I noticed Mrs. Coulter's monkey dæmon doing two things that I hadn't seen other characters' dæmons doing before this. One is eating; when the monkey is introduced on the second page, he is picking apart pinecones to get the sweet nuts. Dæmons have never been shown yet eating; I was sort of assuming that as spiritual beings (or as expressions of their humans' spirits) they did not need to. The other is acting as a sort of babelfish -- when Ama tries to speak to Mrs. Coulter in her own (unspecified but not fully understood by Coulter) language, Mrs. Coulter instead has Ama's dæmon speak to the monkey, and there is no linguistic barrier to this kind of communication. So, huh. These are two pretty big deals, especially the second, and I wonder why neither one has come up in the trilogy to date. The language thing would be one (incomplete) way of answering the question I asked earlier about communication in this world. But if dæmons can do that, why are there language barriers at all? Possibly (a) only the golden monkey can do this -- he has repeatedly been characterized as different from other dæmons -- or (b) only Mrs. Coulter knows that dæmons can do this.
posted evening of January 25th, 2009: Respond
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 Happy Year of the Ox, everybody! We're going to spend the afternoon at the local FCC party.
 Update: Ellen took pictures of the party -- they're at the READIN family album.
posted morning of January 25th, 2009: 1 response
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At emol.com there is a site dedicated to Cien Años de Soledad -- it is a Flash application so  I can't link to pages inside it; but if you click "Entrar" and watch the lovely video of mariposas amarillas, and then click "Fragmentos", several recorded readings of passages from the book are available, along with the text being read. Following each reading is some discussion of the passage; I am not understanding Spanish well enough yet to follow that.
 Another useful page is Macondo at The Modern Word -- a huge trove of links and information about the author and his works.
posted morning of January 25th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 24th, 2009
Edmond Caldwell responds with some very thoughtful commentary to my post on Baroque fiction. I was happy, and a little surprised, to see that what I have in mind and am venturing to express as "Baroque" is broadly similar to what he was thinking about when he used the term last month.
The only place where I might depart from you've written is in the idea that this entails a canceling out individual "free-will" (if I'm even correct that that is what you're saying; forgive me if I've got it wrong), because I think that's still looking at the situation through the old humanist lens (in which it's an either/or question, one either has self-originating "free will" or one is subject to iron determinism, like a puppet). I think the baroque sentence is more dialectical than this; that human agency is deeply or even thoroughly conditioned means perhaps not that it doesn't exist but that it is more collective than we thought. This is a good point and makes me realize that I wasn't thinking clearly this morning when I tried writing about the fatalism in Of Love and Other Demons. Of course there is not a binary distinction between "human actors possessed of free will" on the one hand and "pre-programmed robots" on the other -- there is a pretty broad spectrum of how self-directed a character's actions can seem. (And of course I am getting uncomfortable talking on and on about characters with or without free choice, without acknowldeging that there is an author behind them making the decisions...) I really liked Mr. Caldwell's idea (if I'm understanding him right) that the individual characters in this type of novel can be seen as being subsumed in a kind of collective consciousness which is directing their actions.
posted evening of January 24th, 2009: 2 responses
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 MacMurray is just the perfect actor for playing Walter Neff in Double Indemnity. His is the voice I've been hearing all this time whenever I read Chandler. This movie is such a gem! I'm really happy now because I've been operating for a while under the misconception that I had seen all the important movies of film noir -- but I had never even heard of this one, which seems to be an absolutely critical piece of the genre.  So presumably there's more stuff out there for me to discover. Nice!
Lots of other great things about this film. The interplay between the different actors absolutely sparkles. It took me a little while to get used to the dialogue, for it not to sound stilted, but once I could get past that it was a lot of fun to follow the twists and turns of what people are saying and what they mean.
posted evening of January 24th, 2009: 2 responses
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Ok, this was pretty funny. Sylvia's slightly younger friend Jenny is staying over tonight; they are off in Sylvia's room getting ready for bed while Ellen and I sit in the next room over. Overheard:
Sylvia: You know how Obama's thing is "Yes we can"?
Jenny: Yeah...
Sylvia: Well, (singing) "Bob the Builder, can we fix it, Bob the Builder, yes we can!"
Jenny: (Gasp!) -- They're making fun of Obama!
I'm sure this joke has been made by a lot of people over the past year; it was hilarious to hear Sylvia and Jenny hitting on it for themselves. (And funny, of course, assuming I'm reading Jenny's reaction correctly, to think of the "Bob the Builder" theme song as being a take-off on the Obama campaign slogan.)
posted evening of January 24th, 2009: 2 responses
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I checked out Cien Años de Soledad from the library today -- not sure how far I'm going to be able to get with it, but I'm having fun with it. So far I have gotten to where I can read the first two paragraphs (about 5 pages) pretty fluently; I've been going back over them to try and work the vocabulary into my brain before I move on. I was made very happy by the sentence, "El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo." -- "The world was so new, many things did not yet have a name, and in order to mention them, you had to point them out with your finger." I loved this sentence when I read the book in English but had forgotten it. I am curious about what exactly accent marks do in written Spanish. Are they optional? In these first 5 pages there are several instances of aun and aún, which seem to be the same word and pronounced the same way. Maybe there's a subtle distinction I'm not picking up on. And I seem to recall seeing solo both with and without an accent over the first "o".
...Well this page solves at least one piece of the puzzle; accent marks are not optional, and "sólo" means something different from "solo" ("only" vs. "alone") -- it doesn't mention "aun," but I'm assuming there is a subtle difference in meaning between the two spellings. That distinction looks pretty synthetic to me; forcing different spellings for what is essentially a single word, according to how it is used in a sentence. Seems like it must be a pretty common mistake to leave the accent off of "sòlo" or put one onto "solo". ...Okay: this page says, "The word aún means todavÃa or still, while aun means incluso or even." So, problem solved, I guess.
posted evening of January 24th, 2009: 10 responses
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 I've been using the adjective "sensual" to describe the style of writing in Of Love and Other Demons, and I find that I had earlier called a similar quality in Absalom, Absalom! "painterly." Hm: what if I called this quality "Baroque," would that work? I believe the term connotes a lot of what I am trying to communicate. Rich, lush, ornate detail; depiction of extravagant beauty. The shade of meaning I'm trying for is: gorgeous visual/sensory descriptions that point you* toward a feeling of fixed destiny, of an absence of free will. Is that too much work for such a little word to do? Feelin' like Humpty-Dumpty...
Note: I have recently seen the term "Baroque" used in a literary context, if memory serves by Chad Post,** to describe the long, syntactically ornate sentences used by e.g. Saramago or Castellanos Moya. This may be why I'm thinking of the term right now; it is not however the quality I'm seeking to describe. No reason the two qualities couldn't exist side-by-side in the same work; but they seem to me completely independent of one another. Another thought, maybe the term to use is "Baroque tragedy" -- Baroque to betoken the gorgeousness of the descriptions, tragedy for the fatalism. This might work. I see however that this term is already in use.
* (Somehow: I'm still trying to figure out how this pointing works.) ** Nope: it was Edmond Caldwell. Curse you, memory!
posted morning of January 24th, 2009: 3 responses
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A warning at the top: this post is trying to tie together a couple of disparate strands of thought, and is going to read like a rough draft. I may rewrite it later. I am finding it hard to praise or condemn any of the characters in Of Love and Other Demons, though their actions and thoughts are certainly ones I can find worthy of praise or condemnation. What I mean to get at here: this novel is written from a fatalistic viewpoint. The characters are acting without free will, because they have to perform their parts. This sounds (when I read it) like a criticism of the novel -- like I am saying García Márquez cannot draw characters who I believe to be "fully human," since "fully human" includes "possessed of free will" -- characters who unchoosingly act out parts written for them, are puppets. That is not my intention however. The characters do read as fully human individuals, people I can sympathize with, can imagine myself as being. The Bishop's insistence that Sierva María is possessed -- based on acta written up by the Abbess which he knows to be worthless, and in the face of Father Cayetano Delaura's affirmation that she is sane -- is completely inexplicable to me except as malevolence; but instead of trying to explain it and calling it malevolent, I find that I'm accepting it as the way the world is in this book. I'm wondering how strongly tied in this is to the sensual quality of García Márquez' prose that I identified earlier. Another author whose writing I would characterize as sensual is William Faulkner, and I do remember a similar feeling of fatalism in reading his novels. I don't want to go too far with this though because it can make me feel like a poseur -- I'm not a critic, my understanding of literary style is guesswork cobbled together with stray bits of memory -- and I've gotten the sense that using Faulkner as a point of comparison is easy and meaningless without further explication.
posted morning of January 24th, 2009: Respond
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