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Sunday, March 15th, 2009
Richie Shulberg (aka Citizen Kafka) passed away at home last night. I'm really sorry to hear about this, meeting him always lifted my spirits. Richie is the guy who got me interested in old-time music and bluegrass -- I first met him in the late 90's when he was leading a weekly jam at a bar in Chinatown, and I associate the months I attended this jam session with the beginning of my developing a musical ear and a musical style. Every time I have run into him since then he's asked after my music and my life, and spent some time talking with me -- my memory of him is of somebody who always took an interest. He will be missed.
 Here are Richie (in the yellow shirt) and the Wretched Refuse String Band, playing Jalopy in Brooklyn last spring:
posted afternoon of March 15th, 2009: Respond
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I've been meaning to post this passage from The Amber Spyglass, which I found deeply moving and which I think sums up the entire trilogy in a couple of paragraphs. I don't have much to say about it beyond that, so will just quote. (Note: if you are reading or planning to read the series and do not like spoilers, don't read this entry.) The setting is the world of the dead; Lyra and Will are planning to create an opening which will allow the ghosts of the dead to escape into the world of the living, that they might be annihilated, allowed truly to die. Long quote below the fold.
↷read the rest...
posted morning of March 15th, 2009: 5 responses
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 How I come to be reading The Hobbit now: Sylvia and I are pretty close to finishing up The Amber Spyglass now; I was casting about for what book to read next and realized that His Dark Materials is reminding me in some key ways of Tolkien's trilogy. That made me think about how much I had loved The Hobbit as a kid -- if memory serves I loved it much more deeply than the trilogy, it seems like I read The Lord of the Rings less whole-heartedly, with an eye mostly toward keeping up with my D&D-enthusiast friends... Anways -- so I asked Sylvia if she would like to read this next, she said she would (unsurprising -- she's really getting into fantasy novels nowadays), and I thought I would look through it beforehand.
And I'm falling in love all over again. I had forgotten how attractively witty and cultured Tolkien's narrative voice is -- it reminds me a lot of Grahame's voice in The Wind in the Willows. I wonder if this is true of the trilogy as well -- I expect it is, and suddenly I'm looking forward to rereading those books, and thinking I might get a lot more out of them than I did back in my childhood.
posted morning of March 15th, 2009: 4 responses
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Friday, March 13th, 2009
 My memory of reading The Hobbit (which happened about 30 years ago) has always been a very positive one, of being into the book in a pre-analytical way and just loving it, and I was always scared to pick it up to reread for fear that quality of the experience would be gone. I am happy to report (a few chapters in) that the quality is not only present but is augmented by seeing the page with a little more experienced (hopefully wiser but certainly more familiar with the world) eye.
Don't miss Tove Jansson's illustrations for a Swedish edition of The Hobbit. (And it just occurs to me, oh yeah! Hobbits and Moomins have certain distinct similarities! Also Hobbits and Hemulens.)
posted evening of March 13th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, March 12th, 2009
I'm still on vacation from blogging; but this is too good of news to pass up: Kate Beaton's new web site is open for business! And lovely to look upon.
Speaking of comix: Elan Rodger Trinidad has a hilarious Watchmen spoof at io9; be sure to follow the link there to Seanbaby's Hostess™ nostalgia.
posted evening of March 12th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Hm, this is looking like a quiet time for the site. I'm not sure why exactly. But I think I will take a couple of days off.
posted morning of March 10th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, March 8th, 2009
Saramago posts today about International Women's Day:
I've just been watching the TV news, demonstrations by women all over the world, and I'm asking myself one more time what disgraceful  world this is, where half the population still has to take to the streets to demand what should be obvious to everyone...
They say that my greatest characters are women, and I believe this is correct. At times I think the women whom I've described are suggestions which I myself would like to follow. Perhaps they are just models, perhaps they do not exist, but one thing I am sure of: with them, chaos could never have established itself in this world, because they have always known the scale of the human being.
I'm not completely sure about the translation in that last paragraph; it sounds pretty stilted the way I have written it. Possibly this is true of the original as well -- "chaos could never have established itself in this world" strikes me as a very strange thing to say, when the world is fundamentally chaotic -- and I don't see Saramago's women as imposers of order on natural chaos. This may be a clue into Saramago's understanding of the universe; I could see a reading of The Stone Raft in which the world is understood as an inherently ordered structure, and the characters (male and female, but particularly Joana) are keyed in to this natural order in opposition to humanity's chaos. Alternately I could be mistranslating, always a possibility.
posted evening of March 8th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, March 6th, 2009
Au Hasard Balthazar is seeming to me like just exactly the ideal that a movie ought to approach -- i.e. that an item should be called a "movie" or denied membership in this class, according to whether it is similar to this Movie or unlike it. Is seeming like what Bergman would be like if I liked his movies better. There is an excellent trailer you can watch by clicking on the still.
 Is making me wonder, also, what kind of literature there is on the subject of composing subtitles for a film. Some information and reflections in this LanguageHat thread from last summer.
posted evening of March 6th, 2009: Respond
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 I got in touch with the friend to whom I loaned Blindness; she sent me the authorized translation of the epigraph I've been wondering about for the past few days.
If you can see, look.
If you can look, observe. This is just right -- "If you can see" makes much better sense as an opening phrase than "If you can look"; and then on the second line, "If you can look" reads alright because you already have the structure set up to understand it in.
 Saramago attributes this line to the "Book of Exhortations", which if I'm understanding right is Deuteronomy. It would be interesting to find out where it is in that book and see how e.g. the King James translation renders it. ...Looking further, it seems like "Book of Exhortations" is a pretty generic term -- it can refer to a lot of different prophetic writings. I wonder what Saramago's source for this line is. Update: Further investigation of the source here.
posted morning of March 6th, 2009: 2 responses
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 Ellen has organized a film series at the local library, movies about adoption. The series kicks off on Sunday afternoon, with Barbara Lee's documentary Adopted; Ellen has an interview with Lee at Patch.com.
And another piece by Ellen, in The Motherhood: What this movie has to offer to people who are not in adoptive families.
posted morning of March 6th, 2009: 2 responses
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