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Sunday, August 24th, 2008
I started reading Peter Wyden's The Passionate War: the Narrative History of the Spanish Civil War today -- not chosen through any research, it was just the only title the bookstore had that matched what I was looking for. It seems all right though. (I felt a little disappointed when the first chapter was about some Americans who were stealing into Spain to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade -- I had thought the book was going to be about Spanish history, not Americans' involvement therein -- but that seems to have been just a hook for getting into the history.) A few chapters in I haven't quite got a handle yet on how quickly events are moving. It seems like Sotelo was assassinated on July 13 and a week later, Sanjurjo has died, Franco is already victorious in Morocco, and Queipo de Llano has surrealistically seized power in Seville; but I don't see the connection between events yet.  I was interested to see that the slogan of the Foreign Legion in Morocco (under Franco) was "Long live death" -- Saramago makes very cryptic mention of this slogan in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, saying that a soldier had said that to Miguel de Unamuno but declining to tell what Unamuno's response had been. A Google search leads me to this article at libertarian site LewRockwell.com, which gives Unamuno's response as, "To conquer is not to convince." -- More information about this exchange is at José Millán-Astray's Wikipædia entry.
posted afternoon of August 24th, 2008: 2 responses
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 The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is really making me think I need to learn more about the history of the Spanish Civil War. This looks like a good book; anyone got recommendations based on more than searching on Amazon for keywords? Leave them in comments please. Also I will stop by the used book store this afternoon and browse around their history section.
posted morning of August 24th, 2008: 7 responses
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Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
I was looking at Annie Proulx' Wiki page and that led me to find out about a talk she took part in this May at the NYPL: Books that Changed My Life -- you can watch it or listen to it online, I didn't see any transcript. And on that page, I see she has a new collection of Wyoming short stories coming out in September! This is a fine moment to have been reminded about her writing.
posted morning of August 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Friday, August 22nd, 2008
Annie Proulx turns 73 today. I find this slightly surprising, somehow I had pictured her as being in her late 50's.  (Proulx is two years older than Thomas Pynchon, but she did not start writing novels until 1992.) If you have not read Accordion Crimes and Postcards, well, you ought to read them. (The Shipping News is skippable.) And that's not even to mention her fine, fine short stories! I found out about Proulx's writing when the movie of Brokeback Mountain came out, and read just about everything I could find by her in the months immediately after that. I love becoming infatuated with an author.
posted morning of August 22nd, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
Picture (from Wikipædia) is the statue of Adamastor in Lisbon -- it is on the bench across from here that our hero Ricardo Reis spends much of his time sitting. How lovely! Man, I could look at that for a long time.
Adamastor is a god from the poem Os Lusíades by Camões, which is Portugal's national epic . Adamastor also appears in Pessoa's poem "O Mostrengo" ("The Monster"), which is online here with a translation I can't vouch for*, and which inspired an animation you can watch on MeFeedia. "O Mostrengo" was the inspiration for D.S. Maguni's "O Gigante Adamastor", written for the Mozambiquan rebel cause in the 1970's.
 Another view of the statue is at Flickr. (Or possibly the Wiki pic is a cropped detail of that graphic -- they certainly look very similar layouts.) * The translator says, "This page is solely intended to entice the students of Portuguese who may, through it, be tempted to have a go at Mensagem." The page has links to the full text of Mensagem and notes.
posted evening of August 20th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
Here are a few of the things that moved me while I was reading The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis this weekend: My dear Fernando, choose your words carefully, you put yourself at great risk of being absurd. If we do not say all words, however absurd, we will never say the essential words. This is really striking -- I can imagine it outside any novel, in big letters on the wall. Certainly a thought to revisit from time to time. (A nice justification for blogging!)
 Do you regret having written it. There is nothing more pointless in this world than regret, people who express it merely want to be forgiven, then they fall back into their weakness, for each of us, deep down, continues to take pride in his weakness. This is almost a commonplace, but I think the bit about pride renders it original. I am making no declaration of love, But you are. We are exchanging greetings, sprigs of flowers, it is true that they are pretty, I mean the flowers, but they are cut, they will soon wilt, they are unaware of this and we pretend not to notice. My flowers I place in water, and will watch them until the colors fade. Then you will not watch them long. Now I am watching you. I am no flower. You are a man, I am capable of knowing the difference. A tranquil man, who sits on a riverbank watching what the current carries past, perhaps waiting for himself to be swept away. This works extremely well as poetry, but it kind of highlights my trouble with the book, which is that the characters are not fully realized as people -- they seem like puppets mouthing this dialog. (The bit about sitting on the riverbank reminds me of Snufkin, from Jansson's Moomin series.)
↻...done
posted evening of August 19th, 2008: Respond
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BBC Radio 4 broadcast My Name is Red on its Classic Serial program -- it sounds from Gillian Reynolds' note like it was a fantastic adaptation. I didn't know about it until just now, which is too bad because you can listen to the latest episode online for a week after it airs. Hopefully they will rebroadcast it before too long, I'd love to hear it.
posted evening of August 19th, 2008: 2 responses
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Counter to prediction, I did not finish The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis this weekend. I am however moving a bit closer to writing a summing-up post. My thoughts are moving in this kind of a direction: the book is beautiful and full of powerful original thought; but I have two complaints. First is a complaint with myself; I am not equipt to understand this book. Specifically I don't know Pessoa's poetry more than a little bit; I know hardly anything about Portuguese history, classical nor modern (I didn't know until I started reading this book, that "Lusitanian" means "Portuguese", nor until I looked it up just now that that is because Lusitania was the province of the Roman empire which included modern Portugal -- this just by way of example); and I don't know enough about the history of Europe in the years leading up to the second World War. A full understanding of this book seems like it would require pretty close acquaintance with these three fields. But insofar as I do understand the book: it seems to lack the focus and intensity of Saramago's later fiction. He spends a lot of time on Reis' character but it is still cryptic to me; Reis' self-absorption seems pretty reprehensible but I don't have any window on how he justifies it to himself. And his relationships with Lydia and with Marcenda are not touching me. So but anyway: Still reading it, still loving it, with caveats. Later on this evening I will post some of the meaningful bits I've been reading and thinking about this weekend.
posted afternoon of August 19th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, August 15th, 2008
 Sorry about the lack of updates recently... someday soon I will start thinking about posting blog entries! I am loving Ricardo Reis, I think I will finish it this weekend, not sure what I will read next.
I am nearly done fixing READIN to be compatible with HostMonster, still just a couple of things to do -- like I can't post "What's of Interest" items on the sidebar, or update the blogroll, at least not consistently.* Timeline for finishing this is Tuesday, when I will have some free time and Internet access.
We are going away for a long weekend, to a place without Internet or even much of a cellular network -- and yet it is nearby! in northern Bucks County, PA -- and spend a few days relaxing. See you Tuesday!
* If I could do these things, I would have: Added A History of New York to the blogroll, under "Literati"; updated Matthew Yglesias' link to point to his new site; posted an "of Interest" item that today is the anniversary of the Beatles' Shea Stadium concert. Without arena rock, we would not have Kansas, Styx, REO Speedwagon! Also, I would add a link under "Comix" to Bad Gods, which I see is publishing again.
↻...done
posted morning of August 15th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, August 14th, 2008
For several minutes he watched his courage desert him, it was like watching sand run through an hourglass, an overworked metaphor which nevertheless keeps recurring. One day, when we live two hundred years and ourselves become the hourglass observing the sand inside it, we will not need the metaphor, but life is too short to indulge in such thoughts...
This chapter, in which Ricardo's relationship with Marcenda moves a little closer to passion and Ricardo's relationship with Lydia moves a little closer to being taken for granted, has me wondering, why are all of the characters' actions so clearly marked as male or as female. Ricardo walking around Lisbon and around his room is identified as male -- "It is indeed true that a man on his own is useless" -- Lydia is identified as having a woman's eye (more specifically a female domestic servant's eye) for what needs to be cleaned up in Ricardo's room -- the nameless people in the rooms and buildings around them are doing things as husbands, wives, fathers, mothers.I've been noticing all along that gender plays a very important role in this narrative; fortuitously I read a post today at Is there no sin in it? which touched on the subject of "gender performance," how characters on TV shows act out their genders. I'd heard the term before but this was a very useful reminder -- it gives me a name for the way the characters in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis are being depicted. I believe tentatively that gender performance, possibly interlocking with performance of Portuguese identity and of social class, is a major part of the meaning of this novel.
There are things we do automatically, our body, acting on its own, avoids inconvenience whenever possible, that is why we sleep on the eve of battle or execution, and why ultimately we die when we can no longer bear the harsh light of existence.
(Well, and to be sure there is a lot more going on than just gender or just gender and class and ethnicity.)
posted evening of August 14th, 2008: Respond
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