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Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

🦋 Buñuel, Pérez Galdós

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

🦋 The Old and the Young

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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🦋 Requiem for the Smoke Age

Robyn Hitchcock is releasing (with The Venus 3) a new album on YepRoc, called Goodnight Oslo. His 15th studio album! Features among other tunes, "Up to Our Necks" and "Hurry for the Sky" -- good stuff! He is interviewed about the record in the current Paste. Here is a performance of the title track:

posted afternoon of November 11th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, November 10th, 2008

🦋 Galdós' narrator

And now our attention must shift to the Dauphin's visit to his family's friend and humble servant, for if Juanito Santa Cruz had not paid that visit, this story would not have been written. Another story would surely have been written, because wherever man goes he carries his novel with him; but it would not have been this one.

posted evening of November 10th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, November 9th, 2008

🦋 Celebration

(Darcy's library includes books about our greatest presidents.)

posted evening of November 9th, 2008: Respond
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🦋 Juanito's parents: exposition

As I started reading the second section of Fortunata and Jacinta, "Santa Cruz and Arnáiz: A Historical View of Madrid's Business World," I got kind of spaced out -- this is looking like a long bit of dry exposition that would give me a flavor of the novel's setting maybe, but without contributing much to my understanding of the characters -- this is what I said to myself and I started reading from a distance, not engaging myself in the text. (It did not help that there's been a long break since I read the first section, so I had to be skipping back to remind myself of characters' names.) The text is certainly very dense, and requires a good bit of effort to maintain engagement with.

But a few pages in, something just clicked when I realized Barbarita was going to grow up to be Juanito's mother. (Again, I would have known this right off if I'd been paying better attention.) Suddenly all the relationships start making sense, and I'm looking at the characters as individuals rather than as representatives of families. I want to quote a long piece from Chapter 2 of this section, but will put that below the fold.

The description of the (newly bourgeois) families' economic lives is holding my attention a lot better now; I'm anxious to find out why Don Baldomero will bequeath his business to his two nephews rather than to his son. Also very nice: Galdós' digression lamenting the disappearance of bright primary colors from Spanish fashion as the Spanish economy comes under the sway of the northern model -- "We're under the influence of northern Europe, and the blasted North imposes on us the grays that it gets from its smoky gray sky."

Read on for a picture of Barbarita's childhood.

posted afternoon of November 9th, 2008: Respond
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🦋 It's All Happening

We went to the zoo and brought back pictures!

posted morning of November 9th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, November 8th, 2008

🦋 Lyra's Parents: Exposition

Chapter 7 of The Golden Compass is a trip. When Sylvia and I were reading it this afternoon there was a lot of talk back and forth -- "Oh, so that's what was happening!" "Oh, so that's why Lyra was at Jordan!" etc. This is a really nice trick -- there was a lot in the first part of the novel that we were just accepting on faith without really understanding, the exposition is placed so that you've just about gotten used to not being sure what's going on in the plot -- you're just reading and enjoying the characters and the action, and suddenly you turn a corner and much of the mystery is laid bare. (Not all -- there's still the central mystery of what the G.O.B. is using the kidnapped children for, and what's the city in the sky, and why is Asriel being held prisoner.)

posted evening of November 8th, 2008: Respond
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🦋 Two recipes: a snack and a meal

Haven't posted any recipes in a while; here are two -- no real connection between them except that I've made both in the last couple days and both have some tangiential relationship to my parents being in town.

Fruit and Nuts

Sylvia and I were playing backgammon this afternoon and needed a snack. Well my parents brought along with them the fruits of the Central Valley, in the form of a big bag of almonds and a big bag of dried fruit from their friend Indira's farm. It's been a while since I had fresh almonds; they are the bomb. Here's one way to prepare them:

• Roast nuts in a skillet over a high flame. Shake the pan every minute or two so they don't burn. You can sprinkle on top a bit of salt, pepper, cinnamon and sugar. The nuts are ready after about 7 minutes, when you start to smell the toasty flavor.
• The pan will be quite hot; turn the flame off, remove the nuts and put some pieces of dried fruit (peaches, apricots, plums) in. Press them down so some bits of the flesh burn onto the pan. Then pour in about ¼ cup or less of water -- little enough that the remaining heat in the pan is enough to boil it. Put the fruit in a bowl and pour the liquid over it.

Chicken Lo Mein

Thursday morning, my parents took Sylvia to Kam Man Foods, the Asian supermarket in East Hanover, to buy ingredients for making dumplings -- they also got a chicken, a bag of lo mein noodles, and some vegetables.

• One chicken
• ginger
• garlic
• scallions
• soy sauce
• rice vinegar
• bok choy and/or other green vegetables
• mushrooms (those little white ones with the long stem and round cap are best; I don't remember what they're called.)

1. Remove skin and bones from chicken. This is a pain and takes me a while; basically you just pull the skin off and trim away any gristle, and then cut the meat off of the bones. Save the carcass and skin for making stock. Cut the meat into bite-sized pieces.
2. Peel and chop ginger and garlic and scallions.
3. In a wok, heat some oil over a high flame. Add the ginger, garlic and scallions and sauté briefly. Then add the chicken and stir-fry until it's just about done. Put some water up to boil while you are doing this and chop the vegetables.
4. Pour some soy sauce and vinegar over the chicken and add the vegetables. Stir well and cover the wok. While this is steaming cook the noodles -- they take about a minute in boiling water.
5. Drain the noodles and stir them into the wok. Serve.

   posted evening of November 8th, 2008: Respond
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🦋 Practicing with the Devil

So I've been practicing this folk tune called "Devil's Dream" -- I happened on it in my book of tunes, and recognized it pretty well so I thought I'd try learning it. It's starting to sound alright -- not 100% yet, and not up to speed, but it's getting to where it sounds like a song. And then today, I was sort of noodling around with the idea of it and started playing a different song, in triple time, which I'm calling "Devil's Drunk" for now -- it is recognizably based on a similar tune idea, but it sounds drunk. Here is a rough recording of the two pieces:

(Thanks for the inspiration, Martha!)

(Sylvia wants to know if there is any relationship between these songs and "Friend of the Devil".)

posted afternoon of November 8th, 2008: Respond
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