|
|
Wednesday, September 29th, 2004
For some reason I have not been motivated lately to post about my reading. Here is some of what I've been reading: Moominvalley in November (which I think is maybe the best of the Moomin books I've read so far, or anyway the most complex); Agapē Agape (which my mind is reeling from -- though only a small fraction of the book made it past the very front of my brain); In the Shadow of No Towers; and J.R..
posted afternoon of September 29th, 2004: Respond
➳ More posts about Moomins
|  |
Friday, August 13th, 2004
Tove Jansson is taking over my reading life... Yesterday I read the totally captivating book Moominsummer Madness in which the family's house is flooded out and they are forced to take refuge on a floating stage... They end up producing a tragedy written by Moominpappa, with help from a crabby stage rat, leading to her reunion with her Fillyjonk niece and other hijinks. This morning on the train coming in, Sylvia and I reread Chapter VI of Finn Family Moomintroll, the story of Thingumy and Bob. This afternoon I will start Moominvalley in November -- I am sorry there are only a few more Moomin books for me to read after this, but happy that they make such good re-reading matter.
posted afternoon of August 13th, 2004: Respond
➳ More posts about Tove Jansson
| |
Thursday, August 12th, 2004
We got another Babar book this weekend, one of the originals by Jean de Brunhoff: Babar and Zephir. (Also got some more Moomin books, about which more later.) Sylvia loves it (Arthur and Zephir are her two favorite characters in Babar) and said last night that she wants to have it for her bedtime story every night.
posted morning of August 12th, 2004: Respond
➳ More posts about The Babar books
|  |
Friday, August 6th, 2004
Have not blogged about this yet but I've been reading an excellent book, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. Hogg is a 19th-C. Scot who uses the religious and political strife of late 17th-C. Scotland to paint a disturbing picture of the human soul afflicted by zealotry. Essentially the story of an ardent Calvinist who takes the doctrine of Predestination a bit farther than it is useful... Rather more relevant to our own troubled times than I would prefer.
posted morning of August 6th, 2004: Respond
➳ More posts about The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
| |
Sunday, August first, 2004
As Sylvia was looking through Finn Family Moomintroll last week, asking me who the characters in each of the pictures were, she became enchanted with Thingumy and Bob, two diminutive characters who hold hands. I don't know whether it's mainly because of their names, which she finds highly amusing and loves to repeat, or the pictures -- the two taken together make these her new favorite characters. We've taken to reading Chapter VI together, which starts off with a picture of the Hemulen offering them a saucerful of milk -- at first she tried reading it to herself, coming up with: "There is a first time for everything. It was Thingumy and Bob's first time going to the doctor." and so on, I didn't catch the details of their doctor visit -- she modeled this story on on of her favorite Berenstein Bears books. But later she asked me to read the story; I was thrilled and a little surprised to see that it held her attention all the way through the end of the chapter (which must run 10 or 12 pages), though with 2 short pieces snipped out à la The Princess Bride. I had the book along with me yesterday when we rode on the train to Coney Island and this morning coming back, nearly 4 hours in all, and we must have read it through 5 or 6 times, enough for her to know what is coming next in the plot and what the characters are going to say. The trip to Coney Island was our first-ever overnight trip without Mom, and it was a lot of fun. We stayed over at Ed's apartment in Park Slope; I got to meet Ed's girlfriend Sonia, and lent him Tales from Moominvalley. Sylvia got her fill of rides -- various metal animals that would go up and down in circles, and we rode the Tilt-a-Whirl together -- and had a good time at the aquarium.
posted evening of August first, 2004: Respond
➳ More posts about Sylvia
|  |
Tuesday, July 27th, 2004
This morning on the train I was reading Tales from Moominvalley, by Tove Jansson. This book is marvelous! I do not think I will give it to Sylvia though, until she is at least 6 or 7 -- the stories are a little dark and require, I think, some sophistication to really understand them -- as I say this I realize it may be true also of the other Moomintroll books; but as I was reading Finn Family Moomintroll, I was thinking "Sylvia would really like this once she's able to take in so many words"; not so much with this book. Here is a Moomintroll home page, though I see it has not been updated in several years. And most of its links appear to be out of date. Alas! I will keep looking.
posted morning of July 27th, 2004: Respond
| |
Monday, July 26th, 2004
I have been reading some children's stories. A few nights ago Sylvia was interested in hearing Babar the King for a bedtime story, which she had never heard before. So I tried it out and was surprised that it held her attention all the way through; it is wordier than most of of her books, and has more unfamiliar words. The next day, she was still talking about the characters in the story. Great, I thought -- let's go to the bookstore and get more Babar books! We went to the Montclair Book Center and picked up Babar's Little Girl, and ever since, whenever I read her a story during the day or at bedtime, she requests one or both of the Babar books. Some notes about them, in no real order: - I did not know this when I went to the bookstore but it turns out you should check the author before you buy a Babar book: The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant, Babar's Travels, Babar the King, and Babar and Father Christmas, and maybe some others are by Jean de Brunhoff. But many more are by Laurent de Brunhoff, whom I take to be Jean's son, and not his equal as a writer. That said, Sylvia does like Laurent's Babar's Little Girl a whole lot.
- In Babar the King, the tense switches around in confusing ways. In one paragraph "Babar proclaims", in the next, "the elephants cheered." I can't figure out why this is, it must be some vagary of translation.* This is not the case in Babar's Little Girl, which I am thinking might have been written in English, as it does not have any translation credit.
- Sylvia knows how to read the words, "Babar the king".
- I love the names of the minor characters! I get a kick out of saying "Hatchibombatar." (He is the street cleaner in Celestville.)
On the same bookstore trip, I picked up Finn Family Moomintroll and Tales from Moominvalley, by Tove Jansson (another series with excellent character names). I have fond memories of these books from childhood and am looking forward to introducing Sylvia to them, not quite yet but soon. Today on the train to and from work, I read Finn Family Moomintroll.
*Update: Or maybe it is something more meaningful. Here is the abstract of "Time, Narrative Intimacy and the Child : Implications of the Transition from the Present to the Past Tense in the Translation into English of Children's Texts", by Gillian Lathey: The British version of Jean de Brunhoff's Histoire de Babar is a striking example of the transition from the present to the past tense in the translation of children's texts into English. With reference to theories of narrative time, this paper invites speculation on the impact of such a tense shift on the present-tense qualities of the original, on the performance of a shared reading by child and adult and, finally, on the relevance of the young child's developing understanding of the role of tense in narrative. The article is from Documents in Information Science, vol. 48, 2003, and is available at érudit.org.
posted evening of July 26th, 2004: Respond
| |
Friday, July 23rd, 2004
So I'm at a bit of a loss about what to do with this essay I've been talking about writing. I finished reading "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" this morning and, while I enjoyed it, it did not end up being about what I suspected it would be, when I started. At this point I think a critical essay comparing it with The Myth of the Eternal Return would not really be worth writing or reading. So as I am contemplating, this evening, writing a post in which I abandon the idea of writing this piece, I open my e-mailbox and find therein a note from Randolph, in which he says he thinks I am close to "one of the great philosophical questions of our time" -- well with that kind of positive feedback how can I give up? This makes it seem like I should instead of criticizing Nietzsche, imitate him, and unabashedly write an essay about my idea of history. Do I dare? I must admit it seems a bit intimidating; particularly since I'm not sure what is this idea struggling to be had. So... I will continue to think about it and hopefully to write about it, and in time I hope to figure out what I am wanting to say.
posted evening of July 23rd, 2004: Respond
➳ More posts about Untimely Meditations
| |
Tuesday, July 6th, 2004
Today I was reading chapters 5 and 6 of On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and I came up with an idea, that may have some relevance to the essay I am hoping to write -- this work seems to feature a leitmotif of what I am calling "parallel opposites" -- a pair of phenomena which are contradictory but which arise from the same underlying process. For instance, consider the opening paragraph of chapter 5, where Nietzsche is listing the ways in which overreliance on history is harmful to life: two of these are, "it leads an age to imagine that it possesses the rarest of virtues, justice, and to a greater degree than any other age;" and, "it implants the belief... in the old age of mankind, ...that one is a latecomer and epigone." This might be a slight stretch; but these two dangers appear to me contradictory, since the latter (I would think) entails a belief in an ancient golden age, from which we have fallen. Now let's look at the beginning of chapter 6, where Nietzsche is explaining the genesis of the first of the above dangers. In the course of this explanation he says, Socrates considered it an illness close to insanity to imagine oneself in possession of a virtue and not to possess it. Certainly such conceit is more dangerous than the opposite delusion of being the victim of a fault or vice. Nietzsche does not come out and say as much, but both of these opposite delusions (in this context) would could be brought about by the same process. -- I need to develop what the nature of this process would be, and also to say something about how I find Nietzsche's argument here not totally coherent; once I lay this out I might be able to argue that he is stretching his point in order to work in this parallel opposites structure.
posted evening of July 6th, 2004: Respond
➳ More posts about Friedrich Nietzsche
| |
Tuesday, June 29th, 2004
On the train home today, I was rolling over in my mind ideas for the structure of the essay I want to write about the individual's experience of history. It's something like this: I first assume that Eliade's notion is an accurate description of how ancient peoples constructed their cosmos -- this notion can be broadly (and less than fully coherently) summarized as that by forgetting history, a culture can construct a world around itself along mythological lines. Then I introduce the conflict in Nietzsche between remembering and learning history, and forgetting history, living authentically in the present -- this too is a sloppy paraphrase but bear with me* -- and present how this can be seen as a nostalgic longing for the primitive world-view described by Eliade, and finally how this can be seen as a turning away from the primitive world-view described by Eliade. Another section that I am not sure where it should go in the essay or even if it belongs in the same essay, would treat Eliade's idea as romantic nostalgia projected onto prehistoric civilizations, and examine whether Nietzsche was laboring under the same misconceptions.
*It may be that in my writing, frequency of adverbs is a good rule-of-thumb measure for how hurriedly I am writing.
posted evening of June 29th, 2004: Respond
➳ More posts about The Myth of Eternal Return
| Previous posts about Readings
Archives  | |
|
Drop me a line! or, sign my Guestbook.
•
Check out Ellen's writing at Patch.com.
| |
