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Thursday, October 30th, 2008
Over at History Time, jfruh asks the question: Was McCain 2008 the worst presidential campaign in history? And answers "No," but has to go back to the Whigs of 1836 to find a worse one.
 Also at History Time today, a bit of Jersey history.
posted morning of October 30th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, October 29th, 2008
Joyce Hinnefeld is conducting an author chat over at LibraryThing, from today through November 12th. ("Chat" is kind of a strange name for a two-week exchange of messages...) You will need to be logged in to view it. (Link via She Is Too Fond Of Books....)
 In the chat, Joyce links to a playlist she created to go along with In Hovering Flight.
posted morning of October 29th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, October 26th, 2008
Before the movie this afternoon, Ellen and I swung by Montclair Book Center. Ellen picked up Anne of Green Gables, which she has been wanting to read with Sylvia. I went looking to see if they had cheap used copies of any Saramago titles that I haven't read, and found The Stone Raft; and while I was browsing through the used books I found something I'd never heard of before but that looks interesting:  Fortunata and Jacinta, by Benito Pérez Galdós (tr. Agnes Moncy Gullón, 1986) -- a weighty 19th-century novel set in Madrid. I'm looking forward to reading it -- the first couple of pages are good reading -- and speculating that it may give me some background for Saramago and other modern Iberian novelists.
 A nice passage, from the end of the first chapter. The narrator is describing how Juanito Santa Cruz changed from an avid reader and thinker in college to an anti-intellectual adult:
Living was relating to others, enjoying and suffering, desiring, hating and loing. Reading was artificial borrowed life... He claimed that the difference between these two ways of living was like the difference between eating a chop yourself and having someone tell you how and when someone else ate it, making the story a really good one of course -- describing the expression on the person's face, his pleasure from chewing the meat, his satisfaction upon swallowing it, and then his placid digestion.
posted evening of October 26th, 2008: Respond
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I was thinking more today about why I am identifying Scarlet as the main character of In Hovering Flight, and what it means: the plot* is events that happen in the lives of Scarlet's parents and their friends, she is involved mainly as a spectator. Scarlet is about my age (2 years older), and I can roughly identify all the people in her parents' crowd as people I knew growing up. I am finding it easy to identify with Scarlet's role watching her parents and their friends, forming attachments for some and failing to attach with others, but never really being able to understand them as people rather than as "characters" -- She is experiencing her life as a story told to her. Something that is really puzzling me: The excerpts from Addie's field journal that are part of this book, are from the first field journal, the one she kept in Tom's class. But it was explicitly pointed out in the first chapter, that this was the journal which Tom would not show to Scarlet, presumably because of its role in the beginning of his and Addie's relationship. So it doesn't fit in with the rest of the book being Scarlet's pov. I'm hoping to get some kind of explanation for this before too long. Note: Chapters Nine and Ten are some of the best writing so far. I'm hoping for more of this, it's really comfortable to read.
* Understood to mean "the plot thus far" -- I've only read half the book so far. These ideas are developing as I progress through it.
posted evening of October 26th, 2008: 2 responses
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Saturday, October 25th, 2008
I am finding In Hovering Flight to be very strongly a book about one single character, Scarlet; all the other figures seem to be present in service of her story. This is a pretty common state of affairs with novels, and not something I hold against the book; but it's striking me as odd that so much of the book is devoted to people who are not the primary character -- when I started Chapter Nine this evening I had an immediate reaction of "Oh yeah, now this feels like a novel again!" as Scarlet re-entered the picture, after a long expository section about Tom and Addie's history.
 Also in Chapter Nine, beautiful timing: The oriole's nest, that delicate, swinging pendulum woven from plant fiber and hair, made Scarlet cry every time she saw it. She could still see Richard's face as he held it up for everyone to view one evening at dinner, swinging it slowly back and forth and following it with his eyes, a look of rapture on his face."They must build it this way so the wind can rock it back and forth like this, to soothe the babies," he said as he watched the nest. "Like the cradle in the treetop." Everyone smiled, enjoying the thought, and also Richard's obvious pleasure. No one said anything about how "Rock-a-Bye Baby" ends.
posted evening of October 25th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
Sylvia has been absolutely absorbed with reading and listening to and watching the Harry Potter books and books-on-tape and movies for a couple of months now. This is my introduction to the series as well -- I am pretty familiar with the plots of books 1 and 6 now from hearing Sylvia's tapes repeatedly, and have a glancing knowledge of the rest of the series from her narration of the events. Somehow it's not really drawing me in to read them myself -- some interesting bits but the overall structure doesn't really appeal to me. But I did recall having Pullman's His Dark Materials series recommended to me time and again, and that seemed like it would have enough points of similarity to Harry Potter to be generate interest quickly. So we've been starting to read that together over the last few days. Really nice language and plot, and Lyra's character is starting to come together. Sylvia's totally interested in the dæmons, what they are and what they do.
posted evening of October 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
Tonight we're watching Independent Lens' Chicago 10, a dramatization of the 1968 Democratic convention and the Chicago 7 trial. It's very well done, I recommend watching it -- Channel 13 is airing it again tomorrow night.
posted evening of October 22nd, 2008: Respond
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Saramago posts today about current abuse of Judge Baltasar Garzón, asking "Do executioners have a soul?" It is a long post and beyond my limited translating ability; but it did get me to look up Garzón and find out what the context is. Garzón has ordered exhumation of a number of mass graves containing the bodies of people slaughtered by the fascist militias during the Spanish Civil War, and has furthermore declared that these massacres were crimes against humanity and thus prosecutable -- his conservative critics reply that the war crimes are covered by an amnesty that was declared "during the transition", which I think refers to the transition from Franco's dictatorship to democracy. I guess declaring something a crime against humanity would supercede a declared amnesty.
posted evening of October 22nd, 2008: Respond
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Barbara Ehrenreich [Oh my gosh! Barbara Ehrenreich has a blog!! It's close to a year old.] explains the Socialist International Conspiracy to destroy the economy. Things were going swimmingly until about a week ago, when the capitalists suddenly staged a counter-coup. We had thought that the nationalization of the banks would bring capitalism to its knees, but instead, the capitalists were craftily using it to privatize the government. ...Ah well, we socialists still have the election to look forward to. After months of studying the candidates' economic plans, we have determined that one of them, and only one, can be relied on to complete the destruction of capitalism. With high hopes and great confidence, the Socialist International Conspiracy endorses John McCain! (via Crooked Timber.)
posted morning of October 22nd, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, October 18th, 2008
I wasn't buying as a book collector would, but as a frantic person who was desperate to understand why Turkey was so poor and so troubled. Pamuk's essay in today's Guardian reminds me a lot of his essays in Part II of Other Colors, "Books and Reading." He talks about reading and imitating the first and second waves of 20th-century Turkish poets, and how that poetry (and the repression of those poets) affected his thinking and his voice.The second half of the essay however moves into different territory, questions about Turkey's status as a nation and in relation to the West -- this is material that he has written a lot about, much of it collected in the subsequent section of Other Colors, "Politics, Europe, and Other Problems of Being Oneself." The transition -- the sentence I have quoted above -- is a bit of genius, a summary in 26 words of a huge portion of Pamuk's writing and thinking -- there are whole volumes of worthwhile memoir that can be extrapolated from this sentence. A lovely essay -- go read it! But Ms. Freely: "exalt" does not mean the same thing as "exult". (Apologies if this error is down to the editors rather than the translator.)
I have added an entry for this essay to the Pamuk bibliography I'm maintaining. If you see any other articles that would fit in well there, let me know.
posted morning of October 18th, 2008: Respond
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