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Thursday, August 28th, 2008
Via the magic of Google, I just found out that a band I never heard of, Elysian Fields, has a song (without lyrics) called "Dog of Tears." I guess there's no way it could be anything other than a reference to Blindness. Busy, busy, busy! I will listen to it later on.
posted morning of August 28th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
La Pasionaria addressed her July 19, 1936 call to arms to "people of Catalonia, the Basque country and Galicia, and all Spaniards." I'm curious about the ethnic distinctions: I know "Basque" is a different group from "Spanish," different language and all; and I had some idea that there is a distinct dialect of Spanish called Catalan , and that some Spaniards think of Catalonians as a separate group. My first clue that there might be a distinct Galician ethnicity came when I was reading The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, and group of characters was identified as coming from Galicia -- but there it sounded more like the kind of kinship people might feel from having the same hometown, without it necessarily distinguishing them strongly from people from the next town over. So, well, I'm wondering why Ibárruri chooses these regional identifiers. Galicia is the northwestern corner of Spain, Basque country is along the northern shore, Catelonia is in the northeast. Are all the southern and central portions of Spain ethnically homogeneous, distinct from these three? Ibárruri was a Communist, and I would have thought drawing these distinctions would not be in keeping with her ideology; but that's just off the top of my head.
 The Wiki article on Nationalisms and regionalisms of Spain has some information that seems useful.
posted morning of August 26th, 2008: 3 responses
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Monday, August 25th, 2008
I am realizing as I read about the Spanish Civil War, how strongly I have ingrained to think about the military as an arm of the state. When I read about a group of citizens breaking into a military base and stealing arms,  it's a huge cognitive dissonance to identify the citizens as defending their government against the rebellious soldiers. I am finding La Pasionaria (Dolores Ibárruri) a very inspiring figure -- overcoming her personal shyness to be a powerful public speaker; exhorting the people of Madrid to resist the military while the radio station was under attack; convincing rank-and-file soldiers to resist their commanding officers. Her "¡No Pasarán!" speech is translated here.
posted evening of August 25th, 2008: Respond
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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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