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Me and Sylvia, walkin' down the line (May 2005)

READIN

Jeremy's journal

Even now, I persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.

Jeffrey Eugenides


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Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

🦋 Shaggy Dog Story

José Arcadio Buendía no logró descifrar el sueño de las casas con paredes de espejo hasta el día en que conoció el hielo.
This (in chapter 2 of Cien Años de Soledad) seems like the first really strong punchline of the book. There have been plenty of chuckles throughout the first chapter and the beginning of the second, but this one absolutely cracked me up. My memory of reading the translation suggests that there are a lot more to come.

posted evening of February 4th, 2009: 2 responses
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Monday, February second, 2009

🦋 Live action, anime

A really intriguing experience as I was reading The Amber Spyglass with Sylvia this evening -- we were reading about the deliberations of the Consistorial Court of Discipline, and my internal picture of it was based on the Magisterium scene from the movie of The Golden Compass; and it was dragging. Then I remembered what I had been thinking about last week, and re-imagined the scene as animated, in the style of Studio Ghibli. And the reading picked right up! The internal imagery got a lot more interesting, the story seemed more real.

Maggie's note in comments that His Dark Materials is based on Paradise Lost has me really intrigued over the past week. I'm dying to find out which of the details of plot are in Milton, and how Pullman has transformed them.

(The Authority's Clouded Mountain fortress totally makes me think of Laputa: The Castle in the Sky.)

posted evening of February second, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, February first, 2009

🦋 We all know who the assassins are

I just finished Senselessness -- nothing prepared me for those last sentences. Probably need to reread the book without the preconceptions I had going in.

posted evening of February first, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Pigeonholing

...wanting to tell everything once I'd been encouraged to start talking, down to the hairs and the smells, spill it all out to a point of satiety, compulsively, in a kind of verbal spasm, as if it were an orgiastic race that would culminate in my total abandon, until I was left without secrets, until my interlocutor knew all he wanted to know, in an exhaustive confession after which I would suffer the worst possible backlash.
(Wow, has Castellanos Moya spent much time in the blogosphere?...) I want to refine my previous declaration about this work being a dark comedy, and say instead that it does not fit into a genre. I'm a little surprised because it's such a brief book, it seems like too little space for such a lot to be going on. But each chapter now is changing how I want to categorize the book; so I think the best approach is to call it sui generis.

posted evening of February first, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Mind Wall

Thanks for linking this video, Dad! "Mind Wall", by Towa Tei.

Note: if you click the little square icon in the bottom right, you can view this video on your full screen, recommended. Also, there is higher-quality video available; for some reason you can only request it after you have started playing the video -- click on the up-arrow icon in the bottom right, one of the options that comes up will be "HQ".

posted evening of February first, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Preconceptions

It strikes me midway through that I have been reading Senselessness wrong, that I have been reading it as "foreign" when actually it's a comic piece similar to other works I'm familiar with. I was expecting it for some reason to be more on the order of Innocent Voices but it's not that at all. Reminiscent of wartime slapstick like the first portion of Gravity's Rainbow? Not as fully realized as that, I think, and the narrator's misogyny really strikes me as off, in a way. Like it's impossible to sympathize with it unless it were being made fun of, and I sort of can't read where the author is coming from here.

But the powerful memory of that pearl of pus between my legs made me understand that this was an issue of first things coming first, that my strategy for repudiating Fátima could wait, and that first I had to stop the infection, so, swiftly, perhaps with the speed of one possessed, I made my way toward the enormous wooden door, crossed the filthy street teeming with beggars and street vendors, and entered the corner drugstore to find a pharmacist who could give me a prescription for the strongest possible penicillin to treat the disease I had caught.

Got my first real laugh in the book here -- kind of black comedy I'm thinking as I review the passage -- and clicked Oh, I see, this is a funny book not (or not only) a grim one...

posted evening of February first, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009

🦋 Up to our necks in love

YepRoc Records has posted video of Robyn and friends singing "Up to Our Nex", from the November 22nd show at Symphony Space -- presumably this is part of the documentary film they're making of that tour.

On stage with Mr. Hitchcock are (from left to right) Amir El Saffar, Terry Edwards, Gaida Hinnawi, and Tim Keegan. The song will be released on Goodnight Oslo. Thanks for the link, Woj!

posted afternoon of January 31st, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Blogroll Amnesty Day

Here is a nice idea from Jon Swift: time to add a couple of blogs I've been reading and liking but not linking to. (Swift says "link to some smaller blogs that you've been reading"; I take this to mean "smaller than your site", which would be just about impossible for me. So I'm going to publish links to a couple of sites I'm reading, irrespective of their size.)

Enjoy!

posted afternoon of January 31st, 2009: 2 responses
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🦋 The Wrong Movie

...Until she had gotten over what had happened with Humberto she wouldn't be capable of being with anyone else, she insisted, even though she liked me and she felt good with me, she just couldn't. And then all the listlessness in the world fell upon my shoulders -- I had gone to the wrong theater, which was showing a boring old movie I could follow with my eyes closed because I'd seen it a thousand times -- a listlessness so overwhelming and paralyzing that I didn't even have the wherewithal to stand up and get myself a taxi...
I'm kind of circling around the text in Senselessness, I find -- the imagery is vivid and the rhythm, as I said, pulls me in, and it seems like Castellanos Moya is encouraging me to identify with his narrator; but there's a feeling of being manipulated, that Castellanos Moya is setting up his narrator as obviously flawed and disordered, to make room for his redemption by the work he is doing. I'll be the first to admit this reading is facile and superficial; I'm having a hard time getting past the surface of the narration. I see a distinction between third-person narration of flawed characters (which I've seen recently with Saramago and with García Márquez), and this first-person narration -- with the former I had a much easier time putting myself into the story. Of course I may be projecting this reading, this difficulty, onto the text; I don't know if anybody else would have this reaction.

posted afternoon of January 31st, 2009: Respond

🦋 St Petersburg, Leningrad

The Siege of Leningrad ended 65 years ago, in January of 1944. To mark the passing of this anniversary, photographer Sergei Larenkov has created a mesmerizing mash-up -- on the streets of modern-day St. Petersburg, bombs are falling, buildings collapsing, the dead being carried away...Thanks, Maurice, for the link!

posted morning of January 31st, 2009: Respond
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