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Saturday, June 6th, 2009
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
I don't have a lot of exposure to Tennyson, somewhere I picked up a vague idea that his poetry would not be worth my spending any time on, and I have not. But I sure like this image: it is from his poem "In Memoriam A.H.H." and James Hamilton-Paterson quotes it at the end of a chapter concerning the sea floor. According to Hamilton-Paterson, the subject of "In Memoriam A.H.H."* is the Dogger Bank, a section of sea floor off northern Britain which was discovered around the time Tennyson was writing to have been dry land during the last ice age; he visualizes Tennyson "fast in the grip of transience and loss" as he memorialized the lost land.I have not been blogging this book too much but it is just chock-full of memorable lines.
 * (If I am understanding correctly -- it's a very long poem, Hamilton-Paterson might well just be referring to the section he quotes.) -- No: I am misreading here. The poem's ostensible subject is Tennyson's departed friend Arthur Henry Hallam; Hamilton-Peterson must just be saying the discoveries regarding the Dogger Bank play a part in the imagery of the poem. Wikipædia calls the poem "one of the greatest poems of the 19th Century"; reckon I should take the time to read it and understand it.
posted afternoon of June 6th, 2009: Respond
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Well: today, Ellen and I have been married for 16 years. Our marriage can get its driver's license now! Happy Anniversary, Ellen! An interesting thing about this year is, right now it's almost precisely 8 years that Sylvia has been in our family; so this is a tipping point: from now on, more than half of our time as a married couple will be as parents.
posted morning of June 6th, 2009: 5 responses
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Friday, June 5th, 2009
 So I happened in today's XKCD upon the knowledge that Codex Seraphinianus is not the only or the first such book, written in an invented language and alphabet -- I mean I suspected vaguely that there were other similar books, but the cartoon gave me the name of one, and the Wikipædia article on that one gave me some more names. Best thing: at the bottom of that article is a link to a complete download of the Voynich manuscript, scanned in at pretty high quality.
 Update: Some thoughts from ciphermysteries.com about decoding the Voynich manuscript.
posted evening of June 5th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, June second, 2009
 A statue of José Saramago has been erected in his childhood home, the small town of Azinhaga in Ribatejo, Portugal. Saramago was in Azinhaga this weekend for the unveiling of the statue; he writes:
There I am, sitting in the middle of the plaza, with a book in my hand, looking at the people passing by. They made me a little bigger than life-size, I suppose to make me look better. I don't know for how many years I will be there. I have always said that the destiny of statues is to be continually removed, but in this case, I like to imagine that they will leave me in peace, someone who in peace has returned twofold to his land, as a person and, starting now, as bronze also. Even if my imagination has at times caused me to fall into such absurd deliria, I never dared to think that they would one day erect a statue of me in the land where I was born. What have I done, that this might occur? I wrote some few books, I carried with me, for all the world, the name of Azinhaga, and more than anything I never forgot those who bore me and reared me: my grandparents and my parents. I spoke of them in Stockholm before an illustrious audience and was understood. That which we see as a tree is just a part of it, doubtless important, which would be nothing without its roots. Mine, the biological ones, are named Josefa and Jerónimo, José and Piedade, but there are others who are places, Casalinho and Divisões, Cabo das Casas and Almonda, Tajo and Rabo dos Cágados, and also others named olive, weeping willow, poplar and walnut, rafts sailing on the river, fig trees laden with fruit, pigs raised on the pasture, and some, still sucklings, sleeping in the bed with my grandparents so they would not freeze to death. Of all this I was made, all of this entered into the composition of the bronze into which they have transformed me. But look, it was no spontaneous generation. Without the willpower, strength and tenacity of Victor Guia and José Miguel Correia Noras, the statue would not be there. It is with the deepest gratitude that I give them here my embrace, extended to all the people of Azinhaga, into whose care I deliver this other child which is me.
posted evening of June second, 2009: Respond
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Monday, June first, 2009
 John Holbo (of John and Belle Have a Blog and numerous other sites) is nearing publication of the introductory text on Plato he has been working on for the last year or so (featuring translations by Belle): Reason and Persuasion: Three Dialogues by Plato. He has made the final draft available for our perusal at the book's web site, looking for comments and last-minute corrections; after publication the site will be maintained as a forum for discussion and reviews.
* So weird: it would appear that AOTW, I am the only person in the whole Internets who has used this turn of phrase.
posted afternoon of June first, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, May 31st, 2009
I started reading James Hamilton-Paterson's Seven-Tenths last night -- thanks Jeanne for the gift! it is very enjoyable reading! When you first gave it to me I thought it was called Seven Truths and was maybe a cultish sacred text, did not discover my error until after I had started reading and looked back at the cover -- this book is a little like Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, in that there's a lot here that is making me grin and scratch my head and think back to high school science classes, and pine for the rugged life of the oceanographer... I'm not totally taken in by Hamilton-Paterson's framing narrative of someone floating in the ocean, lost and looking for his boat; but that is not too important, he's not relying on that narrative very strongly. The conversation in the first chapter between Roger and Hamilton-Paterson and the "very sober, older scientist" about the "North Atlantic Boing" had me in stitches; and I found a usage I've never seen before, of "usen't to" where I would say "didn't used to".
posted afternoon of May 31st, 2009: Respond
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...I was thinking this would be a good alternate title for this blog... So the observations about pachucos don't make up the full body of the essay I was talking about yesterday by any means. It looks like on the first reading my brain turned off and did not process after the first 10 pages or so... The point of the discussion of pachucos is as a jumping-off point for drawing distinctions between the national characters of Mexico and the United States. (These distinctions are generally bald assertions of the form "Mexicans are like this, North Americans are like this", and seem pretty suspect and perhaps out-of-date; Paz does explicitly say something to the effect of, in 50 years this may all be nonsense.) This is reading more like the introduction I had been thinking it would be -- I am hoping to read more in the rest of the book, about what Solitude is and how it is an essentially Mexican attribute.
posted morning of May 31st, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, May 30th, 2009
 I am spending some time in recent days trying to figure out how to respond to the essay -- it's not a form of writing that I've traditionally read much of, but lately that seems to be where a lot of my interests are pulling me. Last night and this morning I have been reading Octavio Paz' "The Pachuco and Other Extremes", the first piece of The Labyrinth of Solitude -- I like the abstract idea of this essay a lot but have not quite connected with the particulars of how Paz explains his idea.
The abstract is contained in the first 4 pages of the essay, which are just masterfully written -- he is comparing the development of national consciousness with a person's emerging from childhood, and comes up with gems like "The adolescent is also ignorant of the future changes that will affect the countenance he sees in the water" and "To become aware of our history is to become aware of our singularity." "But the adolescent cannot forget himself -- when he succeeds in doing so, he is no longer an adolescent -- and we cannot escape the necessity of questioning and contemplating ourselves." In the remainder of the essay, Paz talks about the pachuco gang members he encountered in the years he was living in Los Angeles -- I haven't been able yet to wrap my head around what insight his observations here are supposed to afford into "questioning and contemplating ourselves." I'm spending some time on the train this afternoon, I'll try rereading the essay and see what I can come up with.
posted morning of May 30th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, May 29th, 2009
 So Sylvia and I watched UP tonight, and we had a blast. It is a pretty movie, and an engaging one. I don't think I would go as far as Whit, who thinks it "contains two movies," a silly action movie for the kids and a romantic drama for the adults, and that both are successful -- to my mind the silly action movie was excellent, but the romantic drama was sappy and disposable, and had the feel of something Pixar felt obligated to do. But the silly action movie was plenty for me.
I gotta ask, why 3-D? Is this the new standard for Pixar movies, that everything is going to be in 3-D? It is fun; but watching flat Pixar animation is fun too, I'm not sure this technology adds all that much to the viewing experience.
posted evening of May 29th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
We must approach spirituality with a hard kind of intelligence. If we go to hear a teacher speak, we should not allow ourselves to be carried away by his reputation and charisma, but we should properly experience each word of his lecture or each aspect of the meditation technique being taught. We must make a clear and intelligent relationship with the teachings and the man teaching.
I guess part of my project in reading Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism is to identify reading novels as a form of spiritual experience. I expect there is a lot of "spiritual materialism" bound up in my desire to draw this equivalency. Trungpa's notion of "properly experienc[ing] every word of his lecture" sounds to me like what I am trying to do with the books I read -- this is the filter through which I am experiencing his book.
posted evening of May 27th, 2009: Respond
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