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Saturday, November 29th, 2008
Pamuk has written a expanded version of his October essay on collecting books -- it is published (in Maureen Freely's translation) in the December New York Review of Books: My Turkish Library.
posted morning of November 29th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, November 28th, 2008
 Watching O Lucky Man last night reminded me in a couple of ways of reading Gravity's Rainbow. Now I've certainly been known to make spurious comparisons of various works of art to Pynchon; but I think this one stands up. What I'm getting at (beyond Travis' obvious points of resemblance to Tyrone Slothrop) is, the points where the sheer artistry of the medium -- the prose in GR, the images and  soundtrack in O Lucky Man! -- overwhelms my ability to follow the narrative and I find I'm just basking in the beauty flowing by. And need to go back and reread to figure out what was going on. If all goes according to plan I will watch it again tonight...
I haven't talked about the music yet, just want to note that it's utterly delightful and makes me want to listen to more Alan Price and more Animals, of whom all I really know is their big hits. Also Anderson's use of ambient noise just about took my breath away. This is one of the best soundtracks ever.
posted morning of November 28th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
Have you read Hunger, by Knut Hamsun? Tell me about it or recommend it to me? Ed told me many years ago that I ought to read this, and Norway's a little bit on my mind now because of Robyn Hitchcock's new record's title and because the weather just got so cold all of a sudden... Maybe I will check for this title next time I'm in a used bookstore.
 (Oh wait, I think the Hamsun book Ed recommended to me was actually The Growth of the Soil. Hmm... The full text of Hunger is available free at Knut Hamsun Online.)
posted morning of November 26th, 2008: 1 response
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Monday, November 17th, 2008
 Matt Madden's book Exercises in Style arrived today and is proving to be just as much fun as I was expecting it would be. (i.e., A lot.) Funniest cartoon so far is "Dynamic Constraint", a takeoff on the Dynamic Tension ads in the back of every comic book of my childhood, starring Ray Queneau as Charles Atlas. That made me laugh helplessly for about five minutes.
posted evening of November 17th, 2008: Respond
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 Sylvia asked the question tonight that has been bugging me since we started reading The Golden Compass: "How do people get their dæmons when they are born?" I have no answer -- I said well, do you think the dæmons are born with the people, and she was like maybe...
posted evening of November 17th, 2008: Respond
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 The complete works of H.P. Lovecraft are now readable at dagonbytes.com. Cause for good cheer among the paranoid. I loved his stories as a child, have not read them in a long time though. (via Doug in comments at Is there no sin in it?)
posted afternoon of November 17th, 2008: Respond
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Sr. Saramago é 86 anos.
posted morning of November 17th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, November 14th, 2008
The narrative style in Fortunata and Jacinta (at least, as it is filtered through this particular translator) is not exactly my preferred style. As I said before, it takes a lot of work to keep myself engaged with what's going on in the story -- in the works of fiction I really love, entering into the world of the book is an effortless thing. But that said, I think Pérez Galdós has a really exceptionally keen eye for human nature -- his observations of Juanito and Jacinta are resonating with me in a really close-to-home way. I've had a couple of moments recently of nodding my head in agreement and in surprise at the power of his depictions of their relationship. For instance, when Juanito was drunk on manzanilla and debasing himself before his new wife as a worthless cad for leaving Fortunata, I instinctively knew what was in his head -- I recognized times I've acted the same way and at the same time thought "Oh man, what an asshole he's being!" Now this is not a completely new thought -- I could have identified this behavior and its undesirability before reading this passage -- but I think Pérez Galdós' crystallization of this particular behavior pattern is striking and will stay with me. So nice from, I guess, a pædagogical angle.
posted afternoon of November 14th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
Wow, this is unexpected and kind of exciting: Googling around for information about Benito Pérez Galdós reveals that Buñuel's Viridiana was (loosely) based on his novel Halma, and another of Buñuel's movies, Nazarín -- which I have not seen but sounds great -- is also based on a text by Pérez Galdós. Slant magazine describes Viridiana as "noticeably derivative of the similarly-themed Nazarín," which it calls "Buñuel's 1958 masterpiece." Not sure how much use this knowledge will be for me; Halma does not appear to be translated into English and I don't even know what the title of the source text for Nazarín is. Still: interesting.
 (Looks like the title of the source text for Nazarín is Nazarín -- Biblioteca Nueva published an edition of it and Halma bound together a few years back. No luck looking for translations though.) Update: Dr. Rhian Davies of the University of Sheffield has compiled a list of Pérez Galdós's works in translation. Jo Labanyi's translation of Nazarín was published in '96. No translation of Halma apparently. Dr. Davies also let me know that Buñuel's Tristana (1970) is an adaptation of Perez Galdós' work of the same title. Tristana appears in translation in Colin Partridge's book Tristana: Buñuel's Film and Galdós' Novel: A Case Study. I have pulled an essay that deals with Tristana in some detail from Google's cache.
posted afternoon of November 12th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
I'll try my hand at translating another entry from Saramago's blog. (I am working from the Spanish translation.) Today he is writing about skepticism.
Some people say that skepticism is an infirmity of old age, an ailment of recent times, a sclerosis of the will. I don't dare to say this diagnosis is completely wrong, but I will say that it would be too comfortable to try to escape all difficulties through this door, as if the actual state of the world were a simple consequence of the old being old... The dreams of the young have never succeeded, at least until now, in making the world any better, and the rejuvenated bile of the old has never been enough to make it worse. Clearly the world -- poor world -- is not to blame for the evils afflicting it. That which we call the state of the world is the state of the unlucky humanity that we are, inevitably composed of old people who were young, young people who will be old, others who are not young and are not yet old. Whose fault? I hear it said that everyone bears the blame, that nobody can be presumed innocent, but I find that these sort of declarations, which appear to distribute justice evenly, are no more than spurious recurring mutations of the so-called original sin, which serve only to dilute and obscure, in an imaginary collective guilt, the responsibilities of the authentically culpable. The state, not of the world, but of life.I write this on a day in which there have arrived in Spain and in Italy hundreds of men, women and children in the fragile vessels which are used to reach the imagined paradise of a wealthy Europe. On the island of Hierro, in the Canaries, for example, there arrived such a boat, carrying inside it a dead child, and some castaways who declared that during the journey, twenty shipmates died and were cast into the sea in martyrdom... So do not speak to me of skepticism, please.
Saramago links to Sara Prestianni's web site (in French) documenting migrants' stories, and to the NoBorders gallery on Flickr.
posted evening of November 11th, 2008: 2 responses
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