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Me and Sylvia at the Memorial (April 2009)

READIN

Jeremy's journal

One never stops reading, though books come to an end, just as one never stops living, even though death is a certainty.

Roberto Bolaño


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Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

🦋 History is told by the victors

With that proverb in mind, Kirill Yuryevitch Yeskov set out to relate an alternate history of Tolkein's Middle Earth from the point of view of the losing side: Yeskov tells the story of the War of the Ring as seen by the forces of Mordor. Fascinating! Yeskov published his book Последний кольценосец in 1999; it does not look like a commercial translation in English will be forthcoming any time soon because the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien does not cotton to infringement on its intellectual property... But fandom to the rescue! Blogger Yisroel Markov has made available his translation of The Last Ring-Bearer (done over the course of "a few dozen lunch hours," and vetted and corrected by Eskov) for free download. Far out. Thanks, Mr. Markov! (and thanks for letting me know about this, Gabe!)

(Readers of Russian can peruse the original at lib.ru.) ...And more: an essay by Yeskov at Salon.

posted evening of February 15th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about The Lord of the Rings

🦋 Elige tu propia aventura

Stanislaus Bhor of Hermano Cerdo calls our attention to Raúl Quirós Molina's new multimedia work, Un hombre cae de un edificio, and particularly to its first story, Un día soleada en Königsberg -- "A Sunny Day in Königsberg". Oh look, a hypertext adventure that lets you determine the course of the plot! Fun! A bit of a downer perhaps, compared to the old Choose Your Own Adventure young-adult books... Opening line: "At the end of this story, the protagonist -- that is to say, you yourself -- dies." Now let's figure out how that's going to come about...

posted evening of February 15th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Readings

Monday, February 14th, 2011

🦋 Romantic beauty

A few things have reminded me lately of José Cárdenas Peña's poetry. Here is a translation that I spent some time on last summer.

El delincuente

Si sólo fuese el grito
del agua,
o el rodar de una piedra
que no encuentro acomodo
a la orilla del llanto.
Si sólo fuese
la herida corrosiva
de los pasos sin nombre
en los días que mueren,
o la processión lenta de las horas
(centinelas del miedo).
Si sólo fuese el puñado de hierba
lo que cubre a la sangre,
aventada al olvido,
para poder decir:
es el final.

Too Late

If only it were just the scream
the water's scream,
the restless turning of a stone
which finds no spot to nestle
by the banks of the storm.
If only it were just
the wound, corrosive wound,
that nameless passage,
flow of dead time;
the soft procession of the hours
(sentinels of fear).
If only that bundle of herbs,
the ones we use to bind our wounds,
could be scattered to oblivion,
that we might say:
it is over.
I'm torn here between the beauty of the language and imagery, and a fear that I'm not really understanding the poem, am misreading and mistranslating... A more literal translation of the title is "The Juvenile Offender" -- I could not make any sense of that so I seized on an alternate meaning of "delinquent" in English, but I really have no idea if that works in Spanish.

Cárdenas Peña seems like a good poet for Valentine's Day as he is just about as Romantic as they come. Wikipædia says that he was "infatuated with beauty, with masculine beauty; he passed his thankless days in Platonic admiration of young men's bodies. The contemplation of physical beauty, the slow and sensuous writing of his poetry, the dialogues which he carried out with himself in cheap hotels and in the beds of the poorhouse -- perhaps these were the three fundamental activities of his life."

posted evening of February 14th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Los contados días

🦋 Happy Valentine's Day

My two favorite love songs, for you:

posted morning of February 14th, 2011: 1 response
➳ More posts about Music

Sunday, February 13th, 2011

🦋 Cryptic, ageless

Coincidence? I've been seeing a lot of links lately to information about the Voynich manuscript. The latest is a story about physicist Greg Hodgins of the University of Arizona, who has dated the document to the 15th Century, 100 years older than it was previously thought to be. Thanks for the link, Peter!

For a high-quality, page by page scan of the manuscript, visit Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library Voynich Manuscript site, and click on the "page by page" link at the top of the page.

Borrowed Beams of Light's Kickstarter project is still going on -- they're nearly a third of the way to their goal!

posted evening of February 13th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about The Voynich Manuscript

Saturday, February 12th, 2011

🦋 East of Eden

It might seem peculiar to go to Saramago seeking reverence -- he is rather famously atheistic, maybe even intemperately so; he was notoriously denounced by the Catholic church heirarchy after publication of his final novel, Caín, when he said humanity would be better off without the Holy Bible. (And who am I, no Christian myself, to be seeking or discussing reverence? We'll leave that question by the side for now.) But: I found The Gospel According to Jesus Christ to be a superlatively reverent book, that quality was one of my favorite things about the book; and I am hoping as I start Caín that it will share that quality.

Things are looking a little dodgy starting with the epigraph -- Saramago quotes chapter 11, verse 4 of St. Paul's letter to the Hebrews, and attributes it to the Libro de los disparates, roughly the "Book of Nonsense". I agree with Rafael Rodríguez Hernández that this is a lousy opening: it seems to me like Saramago ought to treat his source text with more respect...

Be that as it may, I'm enjoying the first few chapters. Eve and Adam are coming through nicely as characters, Saramago seems really to be interested in their humanity and their hardships. It looks like it will be a fun game to figure out which of Saramago's details are canonical and which are not -- for instance he has only a single Cherub guarding the gates of Eden, whom he identifies as Azael*; tradition assigns this role to two angels, Metatron and Melchisadec. But I will probably spend less time on this kind of thing as I get deeper into the story. Eve's flirtation with and implicit seduction of Azael is very strongly non-canonical/blasphemous, but it is rendered so lovingly that I am going to go along with it -- it is one of the high points of the first few chapters.

*Gustav Davidson's Dictionary of Angels identifies Azael as "one of 2 fallen angels (Aza is the other) who cohabited with Naamah, Lamech's daughter, and sired the sedim, Assyrian guardian spirits." Cool! I knew vaguely (based on Genesis 6:1-2) that there was angel-human cohabitation in the Abrahamic tradition but did not have any specifics.

posted afternoon of February 12th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Cain

Friday, February 11th, 2011

🦋 وحي

أنت مصري، ارفع راسك

posted evening of February 11th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Politics

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

🦋 Rediscovering the desert

I am inhabited by voices. Everybody I have talked to has a different version, an echo of the rumors that flowed over the years, each new story leading to yet another search...
Desert Memories is very much a memoir -- it is a book of Ariel Dorfman's memories and of his search for Chile's national memory. He is traveling through the Norte Grande looking for -- broadly -- a reconnection with Chile's history, with three catastrophic epochs of Chile's history: the subjugation of the indigenous population, the subjection and abuse of the migrants from north and south who worked the nitrate fields, and the years of Pinochet's dictatorship, years that he and his wife spent in exile; more specifically he is seeking to reconnect with his memories of his college friend Freddy Taberna, who served in Allende's government as an economic minister and was executed by Pinochet's army in the concentration camp in Pisagua -- whom Dorfman idolizes and whom the reader will come to idolize as well. His wife, Angélica Malinarich, is seeking memories of her own; she is trying to unearth some of the history of her father's side of the family, which traces its roots to Iquique and the nitrate industry. All of these quests tie together and interconnect -- learning the history of the nitrate fields entails learning about the indigenous inhabitants of the desert who were dispossessed, and learning about the concentration camps that were built on the sites of vacant salitreras during Pinochet's reign; looking for the traces of Taberna's boyhood in Iquique brings us into contact with the same people who can provide information about the Malinarich family. Looking at the site of Taberna's execution and at the mass grave uncovered in Pisagua which did not, ultimately, contain Taberna's body -- it has never been found -- brings us hard up against a flood of Dorfman's memories.

For this book really plays out in Dorfman's mind. The desert, the salitreras, the towns and cities serve primarily as a backdrop for Dorfman's quests and meditations on his nation's troubled history. The bleakness of the physical landscapes he is describing is often masked by the eloquence of his descriptions, of his memories of the dead and his attribution of such memories to the landscapes. And somehow (paradoxically among all this bleakness and death) this gives the book a subtly optimistic tone. A key factor in the couple's journey of discovery is that the dictadura has ended -- they can reconstruct Freddy's life, can speak of Freddy and of the many other Allendistas tortured and dead and disappeared because Pinochet is no longer in power, they are no longer in exile. The couple's love for each other, too, plays a major role in the story of their travels, as does the depth of friendship between them and the other people we meet as they make their way north. The landscapes Dorfman describes, the historical abuses he documents, are all part of the history of this country that he loves and is reclaiming after the years of repression and exile.

posted evening of February 9th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Desert Memories

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

🦋 Central America: Photo Essays

I was very happy the other day to run across James Rodríguez' web site: MiMundo.org is a blog of photo-essays about Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras... The text is bilingual in English and Spanish, the images transcend language.

posted evening of February 8th, 2011: Respond

Sunday, February 6th, 2011

🦋 8 tracks

To borrow a page from cleek, let's listen to Trampled by Turtles!

You're welcome!

I'm enthralled with 8tracks' algorithm for ordering its users' mixes. Either the average quality of mixes (adjusted for being in accordance with my own tastes, blah blah blah) is phenomenally high, or the site's software is very, very good at figuring out what music I'll like. I found "You wait so long" by listening to a mix tape that was served up to me seemingly at random. Now I am anxious to find out more about Trampled by Turtles, and about Cadillac Sky and Old Man Luedecke as well.

posted afternoon of February 6th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Mix tapes

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