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Thursday, September 24th, 2009
Christine K. passed along a link to Rachel Sussman's hunt for the Oldest Living Things in the World -- fun reading and some great photography. I was particularly taken with Sussman's photo of the llareta, an Andean plant which grows over rocks kind of like moss and forms some delightful shapes as it ages through the millenia.  Currently Sussman is on a pilgrimage to see a 9,500-year-old Spruce tree that is growing in Sweden.
posted evening of September 24th, 2009: 1 response
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Sunday, September 20th, 2009
Next story in Cuentos Españoles after La fuerza de la sangre (skipping over several centuries -- did nothing happen in Spain between the early 1600's and the late 1800's?) is El libro talonario by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. A good solid story, a narrative voice I can relate to. And I find that a couple of years ago, it was made into a short movie! The movie is well done -- it gets across the idea of the story without adhering slavishly to its plot, and brings a modern perspective to it. Take a look, it's a pleasant 20 minutes:
posted evening of September 20th, 2009: Respond
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I've been reading some stories from Angel Flores' Spanish Stories/Cuentos Españoles, a facing-pages bilingual edition of Spanish short stories from Don Juan Manuel to Goytisolo. It's kind of a tricky book to recommend other than to someone learning Spanish -- for which purpose it is extremely useful -- because the translations are close to literal, rather than literary. They serve their purpose very well, of allowing me to cross-reference when I do not understand a bit of the Spanish; but if I were just reading the English I think I would look for a more polished translation. Anyways, I am loving the book and I recommend it if you find yourself in a similar position to me, interested in acquainting yourself with the literature and language of Spain. I'm a bit surprised by how well I can understand the old Spanish of Lazarillo de Tormes -- I am not worrying too much about recognizing verb tenses, generally it is just enough to recognize that a word is some form of a particular verb, and I can get the rest from context. The text uses a whole lot of subjunctive preterites and second-person plurals which I'm pretty unfamiliar with... Lazarillo de Tormes (you can read a bilingual edition of it here, by a translator who apparently wishes to remain nameless) is according to Flores (and confirmed by Wikipædia), the first instance of Picaresque literature. Neat! I'm not real well acquainted with this genre beyond Don Quixote and The Adventures of a Simpleton... Lazarillo is fun and entertaining but did not really draw me in, I think the narrative voice just sounds too stilted for me to really get into it -- by way of comparison the first few pages of Cervantes' La fuerza de la sangre (one of his Novelas exemplares, which you can read here) have me falling in love with his clear voice -- I have only read him in translation before, I think when I am a little better at reading Spanish I need to try Don Quixote in the original, or in a bilingual edition if such a thing exists.* Cervantes was writing only a few decades later than the author of Lazarillo so I definitely think the stilted quality of the latter is a product of the author rather than of his age
 *A bilingual e-book of Part I of Don Quixote is available for free download from Fusion Bilingual eBooks. Also there is an abridged bilingual edition from Anglo-Didacto which comes with a CD of readings; my first impulse is to be skeptical of the claim that the updating of archaic forms has been "done with profound respect to the Spanish text as well as its translation in English, [and] only emphasises, more if possible, the magic of Cervantes' pen."
posted afternoon of September 20th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, September 18th, 2009
So for a while I've been wondering about the obituary of Poe that Borges attributes to Whitman in his lecture on The Detective Story... Today I tracked it down. (Thanks for their invaluable assistance to Brett Barney and Ed Folsom of the Whitman Archive.) Borges is referring to Whitman's essay A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads, in which he says of Poe's poems that "beyond their limited range of melody (like perpetual chimes of music bells, ringing from lower b flat up to g) they were melodious expressions, and perhaps never excell'd ones, of certain pronounc'd phases of human morbidity." Also worth looking at Whitman's note on Edgar Poe's Significance -- Whitman's take on Poe seems to have been very much in line with Borges' own.
posted evening of September 18th, 2009: Respond
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שנה טובה! Today is also the start of a new year for Sylvia; she is turning 9. Lots of fun this weekend, what with going to Ellen's family for Rosh Hashanah tomorrow, and taking Sylvia's friends to the bowling alley for a birthday party on Sunday. (This is a party choice of Sylvia's that I am totally on board with!) I hope your weekend is a good one too, and your coming year likewise.
posted afternoon of September 18th, 2009: 1 response
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Sunday, September 13th, 2009
Bearing in from either Limb of Sight,
A-thrum, like peevish Dumbledores in flight
Timothy Tox, The Pennsylvaniad Could Pynchon have put a Harry Potter reference into Mason & Dixon? I don't even know if that's possible chronologically... Both books were published in 1997, so it seems unlikely, though I don't know the months... Aha! The name is according to Wikpædia an early Modern English word for "Bumblebee".
 Update: Looks like somebody else noticed this and asked the same question a while back... Mildly amusing synonym for "dumbledore" is "cockchafer".
posted evening of September 13th, 2009: Respond
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 Something I've gotten used to in reading novels, and that Pynchon really challenges, is a tendency to feel the connection between the scene I'm reading and the plot of the book at large, to read at least in part for the motive sense of of the book, to be borne along by the plot. Reading the Armand Allègre/Duck of Vaucanson sequence in the middle of Mason and Dixon I got thrown off momentarily by a spell of trying to figure out what was happening in the broader plot of the book before I got back on track... It is a hilarious and lovely story taken on its own (or with the rest of the book as background).
There is apparently a movie based loosely on Gravity's Rainbow that is screening now at the Las Vegas film festival -- from the trailer it seems cute but pretty amateurish, and yet I think I would go see it if it were in a theater. Even without much shape, the Pynchonian images are fun to watch, particularly seeing how they get modified passing through somebody else's imagination.
posted afternoon of September 13th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, September 10th, 2009
This is kind of confusing: the New Yorker published a piece of fiction by Orhan Pamuk this week under the title, "Distant Relations" (translated by Maureen Freely) -- there is no sidebar to the effect that "Orhan Pamuk's new novel, Museum of Innocence, will be published in English next month; this piece is an exerpt" or something like that; but that is what the piece appears to be. It seems strange to publish it as a short story without any explanation of that; and it doesn't really work as a short story -- it does work pretty well as a teaser, though.
posted evening of September 10th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, September 6th, 2009
During a flashback to Mason's childhood, when he is apprenticing in his father's bakery:
"What happens to men sometimes," his Father wants to tell Charlie, "is that one day all at once they'll understand how much they love their children, as absolutely as a child gives away its own love, and the terrible terms that come with that,-- and it proves too much to bear, and they'll not want any of it, and back away in fear. And that's how these miserable situations arise,-- in particular between fathers and sons. The Father too afraid, the Child too innocent. Yet if he could but survive the first onrush of fear, and be bless'd with enough Time to think, he might find a way through..." Hoping Charlie might have look'd at him and ask'd, "Are you and I finding a way through?"
This passage really gets me -- the voice is just right, the sentiment is real. I'm kind of taken aback. This kind of unironic sentimentality is a bit uncommon in Pynchon's work -- not absent certainly but it is not what I expect to find.
posted evening of September 6th, 2009: Respond
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...And maybe the best thing yet about Inherent Vice: it appears to have cured me of the intimidation I've felt towards Mason & Dixon, allowed me to really start digging that book! (Backstory: I read M&D when it came out 12 years ago, participated in the pynchon-l's "Mass Discussion of Mason & Dixon", tried my hardest to understand it and to love it, and sort of dropped the ball (or whatever sporting analogy is appropriate) -- and ever since it has been sitting on my shelf beckoning me to reread it, to try again.) So on Friday night, with Inherent Vice fresh in mind, I picked it up and opened it -- and found myself transported! It is a work of beauty. I'm following the pair's peregrinations around South Africa and St. Helena with bated breath, where my memory of reading it before is that this section was something to be gotten through so I could read the story set in America... I'm a little annoyed with my younger self's pencilled annotations -- there are a whole lot of them throughout the book and they are pretty unbearably earnest -- looking at a scribbled cross-reference with question mark I can see myself at 27 reading the MDMD, trying to make a point in the discussion, hoping for praise from the other participants... (Some of the notes are useful of course but they do break into the flow of the text and they are difficult to ignore entirely.)
posted morning of September 6th, 2009: Respond
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