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Readings
I like to read, and I read a lot of books -- the primary impetus for starting this site was to give myself a way of keeping track of what I am thinking about the books I am reading, and to remember the thoughts as time passes.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
Saramago says (apologies for the roughness of the translation):
I suppose that in the beginning of the beginnings, before we invented speech, which is as we know, the supreme creator of incertitude, no serious doubt tormented us about who we were, about our personal and collective relationship with the place where we found ourselves. The world, obviously, could only be that which our eyes see at each moment, and furthermore, as important complementary information, that which our remaining senses -- hearing, touch, smell, taste -- appreciate. At this initial hour the world was pure appearance and pure superficiality. Material was simply rough or smooth, bitter or sweet, sour or bland, sound or silent, smelly or odorless. All things were that which they appeared to be, for the simple reason that they had no motive for appearing some other way or for being some other thing. ... I imagine that the spirit of philosophy and the spirit of science were manifest on that day, when someone had the intuition that appearance, being the external image that consciousness could capture and use as a map of knowledge, might also be an illusion of the senses. It is more often used in reference to the moral world than to the physical, the popular expression that says: "Appearances can be deceiving." Or illusory, which is more or less the same thing...
This scribe has always been preoccupied with what was behind mere appearances, and now I'm not talking about atoms or subatomic particles, which, as such, are always the appearance of something that is hidden. I speak, yes, of current issues, routine, everyday, for example, the political system we call democracy, one that Churchill called the least bad of all known systems. He did not say the best, he said the least bad. For that which we are seeing, which it seems that we consider more than sufficient, and that, I believe, is an error of perception, whether we recognize it or not, we will be paying every day of our lives. Let us return to the matter.
After the event this evening I made my way over to where Mr. Pamuk was sitting and said "Thank you very much for your books." I felt uncomfortable and more than a little star-struck; but he was very gracious and thanked me for saying it. And signed my book! -- Other Colors, that is; he signed it, as I asked him to, on p. 110 at the head of the essay "On Reading: Words or Images", which has made a very strong impression on me. (Unfortunately my plan where he would say, "Oh, you're the fellow who's writing so much about my work in his blog! listen, I was very taken with your reading of..." didn't pan out. Oh well, maybe next time...)
posted evening of September 23rd, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk
Hey anybody who's around NYC tonight and has no plans or easily changeable ones: this event is going to be well worth your time and the price of the ticket. Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie and several other authors will be reading from their work at a PEN benefit for victims of the cyclone and for freedom of expression in Burma. 7 pm at Cooper Union. If you can make it, drop me a line and we can meet up.
Update: Not "from their work", not sure how I got that idea -- readings were from the work of imprisoned Burmese dissidents, as would make more sense given the nature of the event. What an amazing evening!
Saramago says (approximately -- I am no Jull Costa; but with a little help from Google I can get something I think close to what he has written):
I believe that every word we pronounce, every movement and gesture,... each one and all of them together, can be understood as pieces of an unintentional autobiography, which although involuntary, or for that very reason, is no less sincere and truthful than the most thorough of stories of life written on paper. ...I propose a day, more earnestly than it might seem at first glance, when every human being would have to let his life story be written down, and that these thousands of millions of volumes, as they began to overflow the Earth, should be transported to the Moon. This would mean that the great, the enormous, the gigantic, the excessive, the vast library of human existence would have to be subdivided, at first into two parts, and then, with the passage of time, into three, into four, eventually into nine, always supposing that the eight remaining planets of the solar system would have environments hospitable enough to respect the fragility of paper. ...Like the greater portion of good ideas, this one too is unrealizable. Have patience.
posted evening of September 22nd, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about José Saramago
Sunday, September 21st, 2008
The temptation to regard Mr. Wallace's suicide last weekend as anything other than a private tragedy must be resisted.
A.O.Scott writes an eloquent essay on Wallace's legacy in today's N.Y. Times, with reference to Wallace's 2004 review of a Borges biography.
He was smarter than anyone else, but also poignantly aware that being smart didn't necessarily get you very far, and that the most visible manifestations of smartness -- wide erudition, mastery of trivia, rhetorical facility, love of argument for its own sake -- could leave you feeling empty, baffled and dumb.
It Is Time for History is just the greatest thing. I'm very happy it's going on -- people have claimed days up through early November so far. Today, nextian posts a wonderful cartoon of Sherman and Grant, with some great historical tidbits and editorial insight. The comments thread is totally worth while as well.
posted morning of September 20th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about History Time
Jim Henley posts an excellent poem of his that he wrote back in 1997, which he purports to have bearing on the current presidential campaign -- kind of a flimsy excuse I think but I'm glad to be reminded of this poem, with its invocation of Wallace Stevens: Some Affluence of the Planet.
Wallace Stevensâ??s job in Surety Claims
was minimizing loss. The filigrees
of tendrils that we ink into our moneyâ??
stock certificates, bearer bonds, plain cashâ??
are not there only to foil counterfeiters.
Vulgar as the approximations are,
they stand for the fruits of life.
On the subject of writers named Wallace: I'm wondering if Stevens' The Plain Sense of Things can be read as having any bearing on D.F. Wallace's essay "E Unibus Pluram".
The image on the cover of Death with Interruptions refers to this passage late in the book. The cellist is in the park with his dog, reading a handbook on entomology:
As you can see from the image in the book, the death's head moth, a nocturnal moth, whose latin name is acherontia atropos, bears on the back of its thorax a pattern resembling a human skull, it reaches a wingspan of twelve centimeters and is dark in color, its lower wings being yellow and black. And we call it atropos, that is, death. The musician doesn't know it, nor could he even have imagined such a possibility, but death is gazing, fascinated, over his shoulder, at the color photograph of the moth.
I'm finding it kind of interesting that the man who eludes death (after she has gone back to work) in Death with Interruptions, is a cellist. Not sure exactly how yet. Here are two pieces of music mentioned in the novel:
J.S. Bach's Suite #6, opus 1012, is the music that death sees on the cellist's stand when she visits him; he later has the music with him at orchestra rehearsal, although he is "merely a cellist in the orchestra... not one of those famous concert artistes who travel the world... he's lucky that he occasionally gets a few bars to play solo." Here it is performed by Mstistlav Rostropovitch:
Chopin's Etude #9 in G♭, from opus 25: a short, jumpy piano tune which the cellist tells his colleagues is the only piece of music in which he can really see himself. Here it is performed by Son Yeol-Eum:
posted evening of September 18th, 2008: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Music
It is time for history: curtana posts today about the arrest of John Rykener in London, in 1395, for engaging in unmentionable crimes, with links to a transcript of Rykener's questioning -- "basically the only legal document describing same-sex intercourse from England at this period."
Michael Hudson compares the Paulson bailout proposal to the New Yazoo land scandal, the "perfect combination of financial and real estate fraud on a magnitude that helped establish some of Americaâ??s great founding fortunes."
Paul Krugman walks through the reasons for our current economic troubles -- he believes the administration's bailout proposal is a bad idea, and a potentially dangerous one.
was minimizing loss. The filigrees
It is time for history: 
Pet 
