READIN

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

🦋 Scales

Saramago posts today about writing. Interesting, this is the first I have noticed him blogging about blogging. The usual qualifiers about me not being a great translator apply; he says roughly:

Has it been worth the struggle? Have these commentaries, these opinions, these critiques been worth the struggle? Is the world better than before? And me, what about me? Is this what I hoped for? Am I satisfied with the work? To answer "yes" to all these questions, even only to some, would demonstrate clearly an inexcusable mental blindness. And to respond with a "no" without exceptions -- what could that be? Excessive modesty? Resignation? Or perhaps the consciousness that some human labors are nothing more than a pale shadow of the labors we dream of? It is told how Michelangelo, when he finished the Moses which we see in Rome, in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, tapped the statue on the knee with his hammer and cried: "Speak!" One needn't say that Moses did not speak. Moses never speaks. In the same way he who has written in this place at length these last few months has not been more wordy nor more eloquent than that which could possibly be written, precisely that which the author would like to ask for, murmuring, "Talk, please, tell me what you are, what you have served for, if it was for anything." They are quiet, they don't respond. What to do, then? Interrogating words is the destiny of one who writes. An article? A column? A book? It will be done, but already we know that Moses will not respond.

posted evening of January 4th, 2009: 3 responses
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Friday, January second, 2009

🦋 Fixing my RSS

I've modified my RSS feed-builder to include (almost) the full text of posts, with HTML formatting (mostly) intact. I have been slow getting up to speed with RSS but this should make the site much more conveniently readable for those of you who access it that way. Readers should now show, for each post: all text, including all formatting tags; a link to comment on the post, and if there are any comments, a counter; links for any category tags associated with the post. Readers will not show any graphics or multimedia, and will not have the CSS formatting that's in the blog.

posted evening of January second, 2009: 3 responses
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Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

🦋 Supper

Last week, Saramago posted a Christmas Message:

Several years ago, no less than in 1993, I wrote in the Lanzarote Notebooks several words which were the delight of some theologians from this part of the Peninsula, especially Juan José Tamayo, who since then has generously given me his friendship. They were these: "God is the silence of the universe, and man is the scream which imparts sentience to this silence." I recognized that this idea was not poorly stated, with its "quantum satis" of poetry, its gently provocative intention and its subtext that atheists risk much in venturing onto the rough paths of theology, even those that are elemental. In these days when one celebrates the birth of Christ, another idea has occurred to me, perhaps even more provocative, it could even be called revolutionary, which can be enunciated in just a few words. Here. If it is true that Jesus, at the last supper, said to the disciples, showing them the bread and the wine which they found on the table: "This is my body, this is my blood," then it would not be illegitimate to conclude that the innumerable suppers, the Pantagrueline gluttonies, the Homeric bellyfuls with which millions and millions of stomachs have risked the dangers of a fatal bout of indigestion, would be nothing more than multitudinous copies, at the same time actual and symbolic, of the last supper: believers nourish themselves with god, devour him, digest him, eliminate him, until the next nativity, until the next supper, with the ritual of a material and mystical hunger forever unsatisfied. Let's see now what the theologians say.

I didn't know about the Cuadernos de Lanzarote before, this looks like just my cup of tea.

posted afternoon of December 30th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, December 29th, 2008

🦋 Book

Saramago is starting his next book. He knows what the title will be, but he's not telling:

I am turning to a new book. When, in the middle of a conversation, I let fall this news, the inevitable question is put to me (my nephew Olmo asked me last night): and what will the title be? The most convenient solution for me would be to answer that I don't have one yet, that I have to get to the end in order to decide between the possibilities which are going to present themselves to me (assuming that they are going to) over the course of the work. Convenient, without a doubt, but false. The truth is that not even the first lines of the book had been written and I already knew, since nearly three years beforehand, what it would be called. Someone could ask: why this secrecy? Because the word of the title (it's only one word) contains, by itself, the complete story. I usually say that whoever doesn't have the patience to read my books, should pass his eyes at least over the epigraphs, because then he'll know the whole thing. I don't know if the book I'm working on will bear an epigraph. Maybe not. The title will suffice.

In other news, I'm thinking the best way for me to learn Spanish might just be to practice reading. Specifically I'm going to practice reading blogs like Saramago's and Jorge López', and find some more Spanish-language blogs to read, and reading the Bible.

Hi to any new readers showing up from Edmond Caldwell's Contra James Wood project. I don't have anything against Wood -- wouldn't really have recognized the name prior to reading Mr. Caldwell's piece -- but the criticism seems (at first reading) well-founded.

posted evening of December 29th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, December 26th, 2008

🦋 Español

The thing I am most wanting to do in 2009 is to learn Spanish. I feel like I'm almost on the cusp of being competent in the language -- I can read passages and have a broad grasp of their meaning immediately, and understand them in detail with the help of a dictionary or Babelfish; what I'm looking for is the kind of immediate understanding that I have with English, or that I nearly, sort-of have with German.

I'm wondering about what the best approach would be. I should buy some CD's from one of the online language courses (if you have any knowledge about the relative merits of these programs, let me know) and listen to them every day. I also would like to hire a tutor, I guess I'll probably try to find someone through Craigslist.

posted morning of December 26th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, December 25th, 2008

🦋 Cooking on Christmas

Here is a nice activity for a wintertime holiday which you don't observe, when you feel like staying inside comfortable with your family: Sit in the kitchen listening to/playing music and make stock, then make soup.

Lentil Soup with beef stock

• Inexpensive cut of beef with bones in it.
• Onions, carrots, celery, garlic
• Bay leaves, fennel seed, peppercorns
• Lentils and any vegetables you like -- I am trying Swiss chard here.
• Potatoes and/or rice

If there is a lot of meat on the bones, trim it off and reserve. Roast the bones with some onions, carrots, celery and garlic chopped roughly and some bay leaves, fennel seed and peppercorns. When it is sizzling and starting to brown, put it in a soup pot, fill with water, and bring to a boil. Allow to simmer a half hour to an hour, then strain.

In the bottom of a soup pot, sauté some salted onions and garlic and any meat you reserved from the stock bones. (Bacon might also be a nice addition here.) Add carrots and celery and when it is looking soft, lentils and starch. Sauté briefly and then deglaze with red wine, and add stock. Simmer for an hour or so and season to taste.

posted afternoon of December 25th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, December 13th, 2008

🦋 Kreutzworträtselspielerei

Over at the Fifth World they are talking about Hermann Hesse. I was reminded of how when I started reading Das Glasperlenspiel (about 13 years back or so; never finished or even got very far in), I took the narrator's attack (or what I perceived as an attack) on Crossword Puzzles very personally. I was doing the NY Times crossword every day at the time and reading this felt like being lectured about what a waste of time and consciousness it was:

Übrigens gehörten, so scheint es, zum Feuilleton auch gewisse Spiele, zu welchen die Leserschaft selbst angeregt und durch welche ihre Überfütterung mit Wissenstoff aktiviert wurde, eine lange Anmerkung von Ziegenhalß über das wunderliche Thema »Kreuzworträtsel« berichtet davon. Es saßen damals Tausende und Tausende von Menschen, welche zum größern Teil schwere Arbeit taten und ein scweres Leben lebten, in ihre freistunden über Quadrate und Kreuze aus Buchstaben gebückt, deren Lücken sie nach gewissen Spielregeln ausfüllten. Wir wollen uns hüten, bloß den lächerlichen oder verrückten Aspekt davon zu sehen, und wollen uns des Spottes darüber enthalten. Jene Menschen mit ihren Kinder-Rätselspielen und ihren Bildungsaufsätzen waren nämlich keineswegs harmlose Kinder oder spielerische Phäaken, sie saßen vielmehr angstvoll inmitten politischer, wirtschaftlicher und moralischer Gärungen und Erdbeben, haben eine Anzahl von schauerliche Kriegen und Bürgerkriegen geführt, und ihre kleinen Bildungsspiele waren nicht bloß holde sinnlose Kinderei, sondern entsprachen einem tiefen Bedürfnis, die Augen zu schließen und sich vor ungelösten Problemen und angstvollen Untergangsahnungen in eine möglichst harmlose Scheinwelt zu flüchten.

---

(Approximately:)
In addition to the feuilleton it seems as if there were certain games, which the reading public loved and through which the information overload was started, a long communication from Ziegenhalß about the wonderful idea of crossword-puzzle deals with this. There sat at this time thousands and thousands of people, for the most part hard-working people with hard lives, bent over quadrants and crosses of characters in their free time, filling in their blanks according to certain rules. We should guard against just seeing the ridiculous or crazy aspects of this, hold ourselves back from making fun. These people with their baby-puzzles and their picture-constructions were indeed in no way harmless children or playful (?Phäaken)* Phæacians, they sat fearful in the middle of political, economic and moral agitation and earthquakes, conducted a number of horrible wars and conflicts, and their little picture-games were not simply little senseless childishness, but rather they bespoke a deep unfilled need, a need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious imaginings of death into a world of appearances, as harmless as ever it could be.

This comes at the end of a couple of pages' discussion of the ridiculous idea of the feuilleton, which I believe means approximately "op-ed column" -- I hadn't thought of this before but it would be an interesting passage to keep in mind while reading The Black Book.

Figuring out how to translate Phäaken, below the fold.

*Phäaken is apparently the name of some kind of supernatural monster, maybe the best translation would be færies or something. Google results are mostly references to "Odysseus and the Phäaken", but all in German -- I'm not sure what part of the Odyssey this is from.... (looking at Google, looking at the Odyssey....) Aha! Never mind! It means Phæacians! I wonder what this connotes. ...I'm not totally sure of this, but I think the intended meaning is naïf: Nausicaa says,

We live too far apart, out in the surging sea,
off at the world's end --
no other mortals come to mingle with us.

(Book VI, l. 222 ff., Fagles' translation.) So if someone is a "Phæacian," he is callow and unfamiliar with the world -- is my best guess, anyhow.

Now I've got an image in my head that's hard to shake, of a drunken Captain Haddock hurling epithets at the object of his annoyance, muttering "Flibbering Phæacians!"

↻...done

posted evening of December 13th, 2008: 2 responses
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Wednesday, December third, 2008

🦋 Knowing a language

I'm curious to know if there is a term that will express the level of familiarity with a language that allows you to read it with a dictionary at hand. This is how well I know Spanish and French; I almost know Portuguese this well. German I know better, well enough that I can compose in German with a dictionary at hand; but I do still need a dictionary if I'm reading anything particularly complicated in German.

So it's a broad spectrum; but I'm interested because my understanding of "knowing a language" is "being fluent" -- being able to understand and compose in that language the same way one understands and composes in one's own language. By this standard I only know English. But I (something) German, and Spanish, and French, and Portuguese; what's the verb that fits there?

I was reading a translator's musings recently (I think it was Daniel Hahn, but I'm not sure about that), who said that translating was the most intense form of reading. I think there's something to this; and specifically, I think it is probably possible to get more out of translating something from a language that I don't "know", than out of reading the translated work; if I am prepared to put in the time, which I think I would just about never be prepared to do for a long work. The translations I've been doing of Saramago's Notebook entries take a long time in comparison to the quantity/quality of product. But the process gives me a feeling of intense familiarity with the words I'm translating.

posted evening of December third, 2008: 1 response
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Monday, December first, 2008

🦋 Now in The Quarterly Conversation

My review of Saramago's Death with Interruptions is published in the December issue of Scott Esposito's literary journal, The Quarterly Conversation. Happy! I like having written an article and developed it to the point of publishability. Looking at it I see some minor quibbles with wording, edits I'd like to make; but it's done!

It's also not a rave review -- fairly negative indeed -- which gives me a sort of perverse pleasure. Like I'm glad to see I was able to write something other than a glowing review of Saramago, like it validates my having a critical eye, that I'm able to point out the faults of this book, and lends a kind of credibility to any rave reviews I write in the future. Which, well, time to go read some new books and look for a subject!

posted afternoon of December first, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

🦋 O Excellent New Tool!

You know what debugging tool I just hate having to deal with? Purify, is what. Its interface seems insanely cumbersome to me, it's hard to use in conjunction with gdb, I dislike having to compile a separate version for heap-checking. Well today, my co-worker Nick hipped me to valgrind, which just seems like it was made for me. Exactly suited to my style of debugging. Basically it just spits out a ton of messages to stderr, interspersed with your own stderr output you can troubleshoot very quickly and come up with a bug location to reproduce in gdb.

My goal is to become a power user of valgrind -- starting with no knowledge of the product I was quickly able to isolate the problem I was seeing. If I acquaint myself with it's features it's going to make a really valuable addition to the toolchest.

posted evening of November 25th, 2008: Respond
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