READIN

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

🦋 Writing

A very nice line (assuming I am understanding it correctly) from the newly-published Bolaño story, The Contour of the Eye. Bolaño's character Chen Huo Deng is recounting a conversation with a doctor, telling him about writing diaries as a "crutch for literary creativity":

Dijo que comprendía que los poetas escribiéramos mil palabras para librar una. Le dije que en mi diario actual se libraba algo más y se rió sin comprender.

[First attempt at reading this is incorrect -- see comment from Rick -- He said his understanding was that we poets will write a thousand words to liberate a single one. I told him that in my current diary something else was being liberated and he laughed without understanding.]

He said his understanding was that we poets will write a thousand words to get at a single one. I told him that in my current diary something else was at stake, and he laughed without understanding.

Thoughts about the translation of "librar" in the first sentence and "librarse" in the second sentence (and thanks to Rick for pointing out that this is a different verb from "liberar")? It would be nice to preserve the pun but I'm not at all sure how that would be done. "in my current diary something else was getting out" maybe? That doesn't sound very natural to me, and I'm skeptical whether it communicates the meaning of the Spanish very well.

posted morning of September 27th, 2009: 4 responses
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🦋 Fuzzy shade of lilac

(Ellen tells me, the red flowers are sedum.)

Update: Ellen is convinced the purple flowers are a weed/wildflower, not anything she planted -- there are similar white flowers growing in parts of the yard where we haven't planted anything.

posted morning of September 27th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, September 25th, 2009

🦋 ...and speaking of movies based on stories from Cuentos Españoles,

I hope a movie has been made of Unamuno's El marqués de Lumbría; this opening paragraph would be spectacular on the screen:

La casona solariega de los marqueses de Lumbría, el palacio, que es como se le llama en la adusta ciudad de Lorenza, parecía un arca de silenciosos recuerdos del misterio. A pesar de hallarse habitada, casi siempre permanecía con las ventanas y los balcones que daban al mundo cerrados. Su fachada, en la que destacaba el gran escudo de armas del linaje de Lumbría, daba al Mediodía, a la gran plaza de la Catedral, y frente a la ponderosa fábrica de ésta, pero como el sol bañaba casi todo el día, y en Lorenza apenas hay días nublados, todos sus huecos permanecían cerrados. Y ello porque el exelentísimo señor marqués de Lumbría, Don Rodrigo Suárez de Tejada, tenía horror a la luz del sol y al aire libre. "El polvo de la calle y la luz del sol-solía decir-no hacen más que deslustrar los muebles y hechar a perder las habitaciones, y luego, las moscas..." El marqués tenía verdadero horror a las moscas, que podían venir de un andrajoso mendigo, acaso de un tiñoso. El marqués temblaba ante posibles contagios de enfermedades plebeyas. Eran tan sucios los de Lorenza y su comarca...

The ancestral mansion of the Marquéses of Lumbría, the palace as it was called in the gloomy city of Lorenza, appeared as a chest of silent memories of the mysterious. In spite of its being in fact occupied, the windows and balconies which gave out onto the world were almost always closed. The façade, where the great coat of arms of the Lumbrían lineage stood forth, looked south*, onto the great square of the Cathedral, whose ponderous construction it faced, but as the sun was shining all day long, and in Lorenza there are hardly any cloudy days, all of its openings remained closed. And this was because the excellent Señor Marqués of Lumbría, don Rodrigo Suáres de Tejada, abhorred the light of the sun and fresh air. "The dust of the street and the light of the sun -- he used to say -- do no more than dull the furniture's shine and spoil the rooms; not to mention the flies..." The Marqués was deathly afraid of flies, which might have come from a ragged, miserable beggar. The Marqués trembled at the thought of catching plebian diseases. And they were so filthy, the Lorenzans and the countryfolk...

...But it looks like no; several of his stories and books have been filmed but not this.

*How great a dialect for "south" is "noon"? A lovely one.

posted evening of September 25th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, August 20th, 2009

🦋 errno

Perhaps you are a programmer; perhaps you use gdb to step through the programs you have written, looking for bugs; perhaps you have wondered why gdb will not let you examine the contents of the errno variable. Here's the deal: if you are typing print errno and getting the message Cannot access memory at address 0x8, it is because errno is not an actual variable; the compiler has replaced references to errno with *__errno_location() --

print *__errno_location()

posted morning of August 20th, 2009: 5 responses
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Sunday, August 16th, 2009

🦋 Barbecue and beans

I had some friends over last night for jamming and a cookout. It was a great time; the combination of chicken thighs and franks from Piast is a keeper, a crowd-pleaser. I overstocked meat for the occasion; the kielbasa did not get used at all -- I'm trying to think of some kind of stew I could make with it this evening that will serve me as lunch for the week... Here is a recipe for pork and beans which went very nicely with the cookout (and with my salsa cruda) -- it is adapted loosely from this recipe which ran in the Times magazine a few weeks ago.

Pork and beans

• 1/4 lb. or more slab bacon, diced
• 1 large yellow onion, diced
• minced garlic to taste
• flavorings: use your judgement. I used about a tablespoon of cumin, a teaspoon of mustard, a head of cilantro and 3 moderately spicy dried chile peppers*.
• a can of beer -- I used Budweiser, which is cheap and does not have a lot of flavor; a darker beer would probably be good too.
• 4 cans of kidney beans, drained and rinsed.

Sauté bacon, onion, garlic and spices until onion begins to caramelize. Deglaze with beer. Add beans, bring to a boil while stirring; cover and reduce heat to a simmer. You can let it simmer for a few hours prior to serving; occasionally you should give it a stir scraping the bottom, and adding more beer if it looks too dry.

* Here is how to used dried chiles in case you do not know: Boil some water and turn the flame off. Cut the tops off of the chiles and throw them into the pot to soak for a minute or so. Take them out, cut them open the long way, spread them out on a board, and scrape the red paste off the inside using a butter knife or similar. You can keep or discard the seeds according to how much heat you are looking for. Mash this red paste up with your garlic or spices.

posted morning of August 16th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, July 19th, 2009

🦋 Blanched

Here is a chicken salad recipe that I came up with today and brought along to a potluck supper, where it was a hit. It is a good use for leftover chicken.

• All or part of a roast chicken, cut into bite-size pieces.
• 1 head fennel, chopped into bite-size pieces
• 2 or 3 carrots diced
• 2 green bell peppers diced
• 1 red onion diced small
• a head of spinach cleaned and picked

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add carrots and fennel. After about a minute add peppers -- immediately drain and rinse with cold water. Combine all ingredients in a salad bowl and toss with whatever dressing you like -- I used balsamic vinaigrette.

posted evening of July 19th, 2009: 1 response

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

🦋 Cruda

Today I made a raw tomato salsa that came out pretty well. Here is the recipe:

Note: part of the target audience for this is Sylvia, who does not like spicy food, so there is only a little bit of heat in it from the garlic. Add spicy peppers according to taste.

Salsa Cruda

Spices: (all measurements extremely approximate)

• 1 tbsp. fennel seed
• 2 tbsp. cumin seed
• 1½ tsp. rock salt
• 3 cloves garlic

Vegetables:

• 2 large tomatoes
• 1 red onion
• 1 bunch cilantro

Wash vegetables; pluck leaves off of cilantro. Roast fennel and cumin until the seeds start to pop, i.e. about 2 or 3 min. over a high flame. Grind spices in a mortar; add and grind salt, then add the garlic and mash it all together. This is easier if you slice the garlic fairly thin first.

Dice the tomatoes and onion fairly small, and chop the coriander fine. Put all ingredients in a bowl with a pinch of salt, toss together.

This is ready to use right away but improves with an hour or two in the fridge.

posted afternoon of July 4th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

🦋 Placement of a pause

To expand on a comment in the previous post, I just can't understand this choice by Pontiero: the Portuguese

...no interesse desta editora e da harmonia das nossas futuras relações, Profissionais. Espero que não lhe tenha passado...

...for the sake of the publishing house and harmony in our future relationship. Professional, I trust you're not suggesting...

Now I'm just really confused as to why Pontiero would have transposed the comma preceding "Profissionais" and the period after it. My initial thought when I read the English sentence was, this would "sound right" in Portuguese because the adjective follows the noun, so Raimundo is "completing the thought" of his interlocutor, whereas in English he's inserting a word in the middle of her thought. But the punctuation issue is separate. In the original, Raimundo adds his adjective directly in reply to her -- she is a little taken aback and pauses before replying. In the translation as it stands here, Raimundo pauses before replying, and she comes back with a quick riposte. I'm sort of flummoxed as to why this would be done -- it changes the sense of the passage and for no good reason that I can see.

Thinking about this a little further: I guess it's possible that the change in punctuation is a way of addressing the word-order issue -- that the quick "professional" following "relationship" sounds right in Portuguese, but in English the longer pause is necessary because the "correction" is being inserted prior to the end of the previous sentence. This does not seem right to me -- I think the flow of conversation would still work even though there's a slightly false note introduced by the word order -- but it makes some sense as a reasoning behind this change.

(And/or, another possibility is that Pontiero is having a little fun with me by getting me to proof-read a novel about proof-reading.)

posted evening of June 24th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Personæ

Clerical errors, like mirrors and fatherhood, tend to multiply creation. When I applied for my medical insurance, I gave the insurance company my date of birth and my social security number; I gave the same information to my automobile insurance company, and likewise the insurer of my life. But come to find, three different people hold these three policies, all of whom share my name.

The man who drives my car, who listens to my mix tapes in its stereo, was born a day later than I. The man who stands to be reimbursed for my hospital stays, who is the same age as I, has a social security number which if its 5th and 7th digits were transposed, would be mine; whether this is due to sloppy handwriting on my part, or a mistake in some link of the chain of transcription leading to the insurance company, I don't know. And the person against whose death I am insured -- she shares all of her vital statistics with me except for gender. Somewhere the wrong box was checked. I'll have trouble when I try to collect the benefits due me, assuming I cannot produce the particular alternate persona to whom each insurer considers itself indebted.

posted afternoon of June 24th, 2009: 2 responses
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Saturday, May 9th, 2009

🦋 Vegetation

I'm surprised by how quickly all of the vines in our garden are growing -- every day I go outside and I can see the growth since the previous morning. Must have something to do with all the rain we're getting. So: In front of the house are a climatus and a hyacinth, both planted just last year; on the side of the house are a 3-year-old grape vine, a climatus of about the same age, and a vine I don't know the name of. I'm hammering together a new piece of trellis for the side vines this morning. And when I finish that, maybe I'll work some more on a carving project I gave up on a few months ago! Pictures later...

posted morning of May 9th, 2009: Respond
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