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Monday, December 29th, 2008
"Without books, joy rots away."-- Elias Canetti,
The Human Province: Notes 1942 - 1972 Among her selection of libri indispensabili, Marina Taffetani lists two books (the two earliest books) by Elias Canetti, of whom I had never heard before. Looks to be a really worthwhile author.He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981; in his speech before the Nobel banquet, he said, "Heute, seit Hiroshima, weiss jeder, was Krieg ist, und dass jeder es weiss, ist unsere einzige Hoffnung." -- "Today, since Hiroshima, everyone knows what war is; and that everyone knows this is our only hope."
posted afternoon of December 29th, 2008: 4 responses
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Sunday, December 28th, 2008
Lobo Antunes does not use standard construction of language in What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? -- the story is being told in an extremely cryptic sort of stream of consciousness. I am interested in knowing whether there is a story being told. I know there are characters because Paulo (the narrator) refers to them by name and I can piece together what entity each name refers to even without the help of the Dramatis Personæ at the front of the book. There is a setting -- Paulo is in a psychiatric hospital in Lisbon, and is thinking about Lisbon. There appear to be events as well -- he returns again and again to a scene of himself laughing leaning against his father's coffin, and to (I think) his intake interview at the hospital, and I'm assuming for now that these things happened in the world outside his stream of consciousness. But Lobo Antunes is giving me precious little to hold onto in justifying that assumption. The work is reading much more like poetry than like a novel. I am wishing for a supporting framework of some kind that would allow me to make sense of Paulo's ravings. Particularly it would be nice to have some syntactic clues: some paragraphs begin with em dashes, which appears to indicate a character is speaking; but some other paragraphs which do not begin with a dash sound a lot like dialogue as well. Some paragraphs are italicized, but there's as yet no clue how these are different from the non-italicized text.
posted evening of December 28th, 2008: Respond
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Milk was a fantastic movie and a pleasure to watch -- though a bitter-sweet pleasure in these times of victory for homophobic measures in the states. (And see Frank Rich's column today for more about homophobia in these United States.) The nicest thing about it might have been the feeling of nostalgia I got for political demonstrations of my childhood. Somehow in my adult years, I have not been as politically engaged as I expected I would be when I was younger. I remember attending demonstrations with my parents when I was in grade school and high school, and the feeling of being connected to the cause was powerful and nice. When I left home something changed -- at college when I was quite active, it started to seem like a game; and after college when I would still attend protests out of a sense of duty, I felt like a stranger. This is still true now -- work I've done for the Democrats in 2004 and 2008 has not felt satisfying or connected. Watching Milk brought the old feeling back very strongly -- I wonder if there is any way of retrieving it, and whether I should try to get engaged again for Sylvia's benefit. (Seeing as my parent's involvement did not have a lasting impact on me, that might not be the strongest consideration.) Relatedly, I wonder why I don't have any memory of Proposition 6 -- I would have been in third grade at the time, the same age Sylvia is now -- possibly my parents' political involvement started later than that, possibly it was limited to nuclear arms and Nicaragua -- the two issues I remember demonstrating about -- possibly my memory is just too dim that far back. OTOH I have a pretty good memory of the debate over Proposition 13, which was in the same year.
posted morning of December 28th, 2008: Respond
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An interestingly cerebral dream last night: I was with Mike Lopes and one other guy, and was taking a pill that allowed me to forget the names (and functions) of objects in my field of vision. This was fun and entertaining, and led me to a realization that this was the inherent nature of surrealist art, separating objects from their names. That led to a long dialogue about whether surrealist fiction was possible, since naming objects is a sine qua non of language.
 Another dream from later in the night was set in Denmark: The Danish authorities had issued an edict that any foreign national who broke wind while visiting Denmark would be asked to leave the country. I was in the customs office; I had a fart-arbitrage get-rich-quick scheme which involved importing beans and exporting blue cheese and was trying to get the necessary paperwork in order.
posted morning of December 28th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, December 26th, 2008
Waltz with Bashir opens this week to a rave review from A.O. Scott; Folman was interviewed on NPR today.
posted evening of December 26th, 2008: Respond
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What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? is dedicated to the Renaissance poet Francisco Sá de Miranda, who Lobo Antunes says supplied the title of his book. Interesting! Sá de Miranda's work does not appear to be available online so tracking down the source is going to take a little legwork. The book is also dedicated to "Marisa Blanco for her pitiless friendship".
Aha! Found the sonnet in question, courtesy of blogger Gonçalo Figueirdo Augusto (whose blog incidentally shares its title with another of Lobo Antunes' novels -- and which he also publishes in English): Desarrazoado* amor, dentro em meu peito,
Tem guerra com a razão. Amor, que jaz
E já de muitos dias, manda e faz
Tudo o que quer, a torto e a direito.
Não espera razões, tudo é despeito,
Tudo soberba e força; faz, desfaz,
Sem respeito nenhum; e quando em paz
Cuidais que sois, então tudo é desfeito.
Doutra parte, a Razão tempos espia,
Espia ocasiões de tarde em tarde,
Que ajunta o tempo; em fim, vem o seu dia:
Então não tem lugar certo onde aguarde
Amor; trata traições, que não confia
Nem nos seus. Que farei quando tudo arde?
* this is spelled "desarrezoado" on Sr. Figueirdo Augusto's blog and several other pages I've found; however I can only find "desarrazoado", "unreasonable", in the dictionary; and some pages have this spelling. So I don't know whether it's a typo or an obsolete spelling. "Unreasonable love" is definitely the correct meaning here.
posted evening of December 26th, 2008: 2 responses
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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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Jorge López has been recommending Coetzee since I've been reading his blog; nothing has made me as interested as this sentence, from his review today of Disgrace: "It [Coetzee's narrative style] is able to create personalities so lovable, their complexity and imperfection make it difficult not to feel a sensation of identity." I'm happy to see this trope of identification with a novel's characters invoked. Adding Disgrace to my list, moving Elizabeth Costello up in priority.
posted morning of December 26th, 2008: 2 responses
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Thursday, December 25th, 2008
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
Ingredients:- 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
Preparing the stock: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. Preparing the soup: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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Wednesday, December 24th, 2008
So here are the books I've read by José Saramago in the order I've read them, with a brief reaction to each and a note about where it falls in his career:
- Blindness: This absolutely spectacular, powerhouse book took my breath away. It was published in 1995, about 13 years into Saramago's status as an internationally recognized novelist, and seems to be regarded as a major part of the reason he received the Nobel prize.
- Seeing: This book requires fairly close reading. I think that the combination of this book with Blindness (to which it is a sequel) is far greater than the sum of its parts; the worldview of the two books together is immensely more complicated than of either one by itself. The book was published in 2004, six years after Saramago had won the Nobel prize. I have read reviews which characterize it as Saramago coasting, a minor work; I think they are wrong.
- The Cave: This book does not have the fireworks of Blindness and Seeing. It is a book on a human scale, a cottage rather than a skyscraper. I loved it -- it cemented my view of Saramago as a consummate artist of human characters. It was published in 2001.
- The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis: This book is very different from the previous three. It is the most intensely "literary" work of Saramago's among those I have read -- it is concerned with how literary representation of reality works. It was published in 1986, the second novel Saramago published after Baltasar and Blimunda, which appears to have marked his entree to worldwide recognition.
- Death with Interruptions: I found this book disappointing. It is brief but not, I think, worth spending your time on for any reason other than completeness. It was published in 2005.
- The Stone Raft: Hugely thought-provoking. This book opens up many avenues for further investigation (and makes me ache to travel to Spain and Portugal). I'm still not sure quite what it is about. It was published in 1986.
What's next? I'd really like to read all of his books that are not on this list, with maybe my top priorities being The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and All the Names. If The Elephant's Journey is published in translation before I get to either of those, it will certainly be at the top of the list. For now I am going to try and broaden my Portuguese palate a bit by reading Lobo Antunes' What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?.
posted afternoon of December 24th, 2008: Respond
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