READIN

Monday, February 9th, 2009

🦋 Playing with arguments

I haven't really made up my mind what to think about the arguments in Elizabeth Costello -- I'm a little sorry nobody seems to believe any of them passionately? It's fun to engage with them playfully, in fun, but hard to treat them as actual advocacy. Well I don't think advocacy is the intent... That said, this is just lovely and seems exactly right to me:

The behaviorists who designed [the tests for cognition in animals] claim that we understand only by a process of creating abstract models and then testing those models against reality. What nonsense. We understand by immersing ourselves and our intelligence in complexity.

posted evening of February 9th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Rain

Robyn Hitchcock's playlist this morning included a Beatles title I didn't recognize, "Rain" -- I asked Ellen about it this morning and she hummed a few familiar-sounding bars; I thought I'd look into it.

Turns out "Rain" is the B-side of "Paperback Writer" from 1966. It is by John; it was not released on an album until "Hey Jude" in 1970. According to Wikipædia, it is the first commercial recording to feature backwards vocals. Sweet sounds! Here is video of the boys inventing MTV:

posted evening of February 9th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 The Poets and the Animals

Elizabeth Costello is a book which I am finding requires access to source material. (I am kind of ignoring the major piece of source material for this book, but trying to track down the incidental pieces...) Below the fold, some source material for chapter 4, "The Poets and the Animals."

This interview with Coetzee from the Swedish magazine Djurens Rätt ("Animal Rights"), while not strictly speaking "source material," also seems useful.

posted evening of February 9th, 2009: 4 responses
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Sunday, February 8th, 2009

🦋 Bright Red Bookshelf

Ellen uploaded a set of pictures of the Girl Scout troop at the Children's Aid office. (Click the picture for more.)

Update: Ellen's write-up of the project is on Patch.com.

posted evening of February 8th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Vintage Lighting

After I watched the movie yesterday afternoon, I was walking around Soho, killing some time before I traveled out to Brooklyn to meet up with Dave. The neighborhood has -- not changed exactly; the character of the streets is quite similar to what it was ten years ago -- but sharpened, I think, become more distinct. It's as always, a pleasant place to walk around, and I had a good time peering into the new shops and the old shops alike.

One place that really made my day is an antique store on Houston just west of Bowery called B-4 it was cool, which specializes in old lamps and lighting fixtures. The person who runs it has an excellent eye for old metal artefacts, I was really impressed both by the pieces s/he had selected and by the way they were displayed -- the shop looks like nothing so much as a spare parts warehouse for robots from old science-fiction movies.

posted morning of February 8th, 2009: 2 responses

🦋 The constructedness of the story

...Storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superceded by the time and space of the fiction.

The narrator's intrusions, reminding us that he is telling us a story, become less frequent after the first chapter -- once Coetzee has established what kind of world he is creating, they are not necessary. This is good as they could become heavy-handed. I almost want to think of this as a book of essays rather than a novel -- each chapter centers around a long prepared talk, and the characters' responses to it. A curious sort of essays, though, as the narrator/author is explicitly not invested in the arguments being made but rather in the speakers' reasons for making and methods of making the arguments and in the listeners' understandings of the arguments. Elizabeth "is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she's saying" -- but "on the other hand, she no longer believes very strongly in belief."

The Kafka story to which Elizabeth alludes in some of her talks is Ein Bericht für eine Akademie (at the bottom of the page), translated as A Report for an Academy. Wolfgang Köhler's book The Mentality of Apes can be read in part at Google Books; and there is some discussion of it at the Tufts Animal Cognition page. Plutarch's essay "On the Eating of Flesh" (which John fears Elizabeth will start talking about while she is at Appleton) is reproduced at the Animal Rights Library site.

posted morning of February 8th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Breakthrough

I watched Waltz with Bashir with clinical detachment, and without understanding that this detachment was an authentic response to how the film was composed -- that the intent was to push the audience away from the events being narrated rather than to pull us in. I was not failing to get into the movie but was understanding Folman's approach to his own lost experience -- wondering about the motivations and reactions of the people talking, "as if watching a movie" as Folman's psychiatrist friend puts it; and was completely surprised, at the end of the film, to find myself sobbing -- this brought me full circle to the very beginning of the movie, where I had been pretty choked up over Boaz' description of the dogs he had to shoot.

I was a little confused by the psychiatrist's assertion early in the film, to the effect that memory can only take us "where we want to go," that there is a human mechanism which prevents us from remembering things that will damage us. This seems wrong to me as a general statement, and counter to my experience. But maybe he had intended it only in the context of the conversation they were having.

posted morning of February 8th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, February 7th, 2009

🦋 The problem of the opening

Let us assume that, however it may have been done, it is done. Let us take it that the bridge is built and crossed, that we can put it out of our mind.

This novel puts me strongly in mind of In Hovering Flight, there are several points of detail that the two books have in common; I have no idea yet how strong a parallel actually exists though. I talked to Joyce this morning and she said she read Elizabeth Costello last year -- so not a formative influence certainly -- and that she could see where I was coming from with the comparison.

I want to call this "a novel of ideas" and to use that as a way of contrasting it with some other books I've been reading lately; every page is sending me off into reveries of reflection from which I need to pull myself back to what I was reading. I think this would be a lousy book to hear read aloud.

This book is making me more interested than I've ever been before in reading Ulysses, just so I can have more of a context for understanding The House on Eccles Street.

Oh and also: I was put in mind a bit of Peter Cole's statement that the translator of a mediæval text is "creating a fictional character" for the author of the text -- I'm not sure how much of a linkage there is to Coetzee's project here since Coetzee is not "translating" Costello's book or indeed showing it to us at all; he is imagining it like Borges does in his fictions. But obviously Coetzee is "creating a fictional character" who's an author -- so, interesting, I'll keep Cole's statement in mind.

posted morning of February 7th, 2009: 3 responses

🦋 Children's Aid

This morning we went over to the NJ Children's Aid and Family Services office in South Orange, for the culmination of a project Ellen has been working on with Sylvia's girl scout troop for a couple of months now, the Bright Red Bookcase. The girls collected children's books and painted a bookcase, and this morning we brought them over to the Children's Aid office along with some flyers about reading to children and signs encouraging kids to take a book home. The staff of the office were very happy to have the books on hand for their clientèle, and the girls were excited about the project. It was great being around all that enthusiasm for a little while! Ellen is writing the project up for Patch.com, I'll post some pictures when we upload them.

posted morning of February 7th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, February 6th, 2009

🦋 The nature of the language

Another nice line from Jonathan Galassi, from the translation panel:

Peter was saying something I feel, which is that when you look at a line of poetry in another language, it has -- all the secrets and the music and the magic of it are right there in the actual words, and I feel, I maintain that you can inhale that and know that even if you don't know a word of what it is, that somehow the nature of the language is right there...

The translator is a proselytizer and philanthropic in that sense, is that's where he's working for someone else, as well as himself, for this other person that he's identified with in some way.

Cole: And that's part of the pleasure and neurosis of it all, a sort of that giving out and resentment, we all know about...

Galassi:It's like writing a biography of someone -- there's a period where the biographer always hates the subject.

Cole: Well with mediæval literature I think it's more like writing a novel, because you're creating a fictional character; nobody knows who that mediæval writer is... but definitely that sort of transference.... [Freud] said dreams are translations, in his letter to Fleiss, he said that psycho-neurosis is brought about by a failure to translate certain materials, and that repression brings about that failure, because we are reluctant to enter into the displeasure that the labor of translation brings on. -- I know that feeling!

Grossman: Well I do transference better than anybody else, because I fall in love with every writer I translate. And I know the deepest insight into the natures of those people; beginning with Cervantes, and on up. And I have never hated the writer. There have been times when I say I'm never getting off of page 371; I'm gonna spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to translate this page; but always I've felt such a deep connection to the writer.

posted evening of February 6th, 2009: Respond
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