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Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
Sylvia comments that the King and the Duke's plan to perform a Shakespearean exhibition (featuring the balcony scene, with the King as Juliet, and the sword fight from Richard III, and the King doing Hamlet's soliloquy) reminds her a lot of Moominsummer Madness. And I think she's on to something; Jansson could very well be referring directly to this scene. That's assuming Huckleberry Finn was translated and available in Finland in the early 20th C., which seems to me like a reasonable assumption. An interesting moment was explaining to Sylvia why it would probably not be a good idea to read Huckleberry Finn out loud while we were on the airplane flying to California.
posted evening of July 23rd, 2008: 2 responses
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Coincidence: the two times this year I have gone to the beach, I've taken along a book by Saramago -- he works really well for a relaxed read, lying in the sun. I'm not sure what it is exactly -- he's very "heavy" -- it takes a lot of thinking and re-thinking for me to get it. But the sun and the sand seem to help that along. A couple of nice bits from this weekend's reading, below the fold:
...It would help to clear my head too, so why don't we both go and pick Marçal up, and Found can stay here to guard the castle, If that's what you want, Don't be silly, I was just kidding, you usually go and fetch Marçal and I usually stay at home, so long live usually, No, seriously, we can both go, No, seriously, you go. They both smiled, and the debate on the central question, that is, the objective and subjective reasons we usually do what we do, was postponed.
Indeed, whether we mix water and clay, or water and plaster, or water and cement, we can cudgel our brains for as long as we like to come up with a name that is less vulgar, less prosaic, less common, but always, sooner or later, we come back to the word, the word that says all there is to say, mud. Many of the best-known gods chose mud as the material for their creations, but it is hard to know now if that preference represents a point in mud's favor or a point against.
We have already mentioned the fact that many anthropogenic myths made use of clay in the creation of man, and anyone moderately interested in the subject can find out more in know-it-all almanacs and know-it-almost-all encyclopedias.... There is, however, one case, at least one, in which the clay had to be fired in the kiln for the work to be considered finished. And then only after various attempts. This singular creator, whose name we forget, probably did not know about or did not have sufficient confidence in the thaumaturgic efficacy of blowing air into the nostrils as another creator did before or would do later, indeed, as Cipriano Algor did in our own time, although with the very modest intention of cleaning the ashes from the face of the nurse.
I might just as well drive the van into a wall, he thought. He wondered why he didn't do so and why he probably never would, then he listed his reasons. Although inappropriate in the context of his analysis, after all, being alive is, at least in principle, the main reason why people kill themselves, the first of Cipriano Algor's strong reasons for not doing so was the fact of being alive...
Also -- I got a chance to read some passages to Sylvia, mainly involving the adoption of Found by Cipriano and his daughter, and she seemed really into it. Sylvia thinks Found is better behaved than Pixie.
↻...done
posted afternoon of July 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Friday, July 18th, 2008
So after a spate of short and varying-degrees-of-silly posts, I'm going away for a coupl'a days -- my cousin Andy is getting married! So Sylvia and I are jetting off to San Diego this evening. Be back on Wednesday or thereabouts.
posted morning of July 18th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, July 17th, 2008
 I did not know until today about Joss Whedon's new movie (movie? I don't see any indication that it will be in theaters -- it is an internet phenomenon but it sure looks like a movie), Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Just now I watched the first episode -- what a great thing this is! Nothing to say about it yet other than, go take a look.
 ...Oop, well, you can't go take a look any longer, not without paying at any rate.
posted evening of July 17th, 2008: 2 responses
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Tonight we went to the local park to watch a screening of Wallace and Gromit -- the three shorts, "A Grand Day Out", "A Close Shave", and "The Wrong Trousers".  Wonderful movies, and nice to watch them outdoors on a hot summer night. I was wondering if anybody had noticed the resemblance between Pixar's character WALL•E, and the robot that lives on the moon in "A Grand Day Out".
...Yep, well, A.O. Scott noticed the allusion in his review of WALL•E -- which I read a couple of weeks ago! I didn't catch that at the time... Google tells me a lot of other reviewers caught it too.
posted evening of July 17th, 2008: Respond
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This is an idea whose time is long overdue.
posted afternoon of July 17th, 2008: Respond
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 Dr. Healy proposes a particle theory of social interactions, featuring up, downer, top bloke, charm, strange, and asshole varieties of Quirk.
posted afternoon of July 17th, 2008: Respond
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 Today's Achewood contains, among Beef's notions of how it's going unpleasantly to end up, one of the best lines I've ever seen in that strip: "Guy from the county comes and checks the Yes box after Is It A Shame"
 ...CortJstr notes that it could be worse: "He could check the Yes box after Is It For The Best"
posted morning of July 17th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
This is just twisted. Absolutely down the rabbit-hole and out the other side weird. (h/t Apo.)
posted evening of July 16th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
When I was just getting started on Blindness, I wrote that Saramago's style of rendering dialog was "dismissive," and threatened to make his characters "sound like automata." I don't think that was exactly right (although it may have accurately described my impression at the time) -- based on how completely human his characters seem to me. But I want to pick at this for a bit and figure out what is my impression of Saramago's dialog -- it has certainly struck me as one of the most important aspects of his novels. Allow me to quote some portions of a conversation between Marta and her husband, Marçal, about Marçal's parents wanting to come live with them. Sorry about the ellipses, the passage is too long to quote in full:
What's wrong, asked Marta, suddenly uncertain, Nothing important, just a few niggling little problems, At work, No, What then, We have so little time together and yet they still won't leave us alone, We don't live in a bell jar, I dropped in at my parents' house, Did something happen, some complication. Marçal shook his head and went on... I said that we were intending having your father to live with us when we moved..., You told them that, Yes, but they took no notice, they practically started yelling at me and crying, well, my mother did, my father's not really the sloppy type, he just protested and waved his arms around a lot, what kind of a son am I, putting the interests of people who aren't of the same blood over the needs of my own progenitors, they actually used the word progenitors, heaven knows where they found it..., And that was the final word, To be honest, I don't know if it was or not, I've probably forgotten a few others, but they were all out of the same mold. ...Marçal said, I know a son shouldn't say things like this, but the fact is I don't want to live with my parents, Why, We've never understood each other, I've never understood them and they've never understood me, They're your parents, Yes, they're my parents, and on one particular night, they went to bed, happened to be in the mood, and I was the result... Marta took Marçal's left hand, held it in hers, and murmured, All fathers were sons once, many sons become fathers, but some forget what they were and no one can explain to the others what they will become, That's a bit deep, Oh, I don't understand it myself really, it just came to me, pay no attention, Let's go to bed, All right. They got undressed and lay down. The moment for caresses came back into the room and apologized for having spent so much time outside, I got lost, it said, by way of an excuse, and suddenly, as sometimes happens with moments, it became eternal. A quarter of an hour later, their bodies still entwined, Marta said softly, Marçal, What is it, he asked sleepily, I'm two days late.
What is it? -- It seems to me the dialog has a certain fuzzy quality, you are constantly reminded that it is the narrator who is speaking, not the characters. But you get the impression that he is a faithful and a sympathetic narrator, that his paraphrase captures accurately the rhythm of language as spoken and heard by his subjects. In most novels, dialog serves in part to crystallize the scene, to bring sharply into focus what is happening and whom it's happening to; the dynamic in Saramago's novels is kind of the opposite -- dialog pulls the lens back and mutes the focus. You identify with the characters but with the understanding that you are identifying with the narrator's descriptions of them, and thus with the narrator.
posted evening of July 15th, 2008: 4 responses
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