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Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
I commented at The Great Whatsit today that I was not finding the second and third books of the His Dark Materials series quite as  overwhelmingly great as I found the first. But as of the reading I did with Sylvia tonight -- chapter 2 of The Amber Spyglass -- I want to take that back, and just say the middle book is a lull between two masterpieces. The beauty of the narrative here is just enough to take my breath away. I am realizing that these books could be made into a truly fantastic series of movies if only the studios were not so attached to live action and CGI -- I think they are a perfect match for anime (or maybe I mean "for Studio Ghibli", which is about the sum total of my exposure to anime). Reading about Will talking to Balthamos and Baruch, especially the fight against Metatron, was bringing visions of Spirited Away flickering across my mind. Metatron is even a perfect name for an anime bad guy! I also noticed a couple of coincidences of imagery with Cien Años de Soledad, which I take as a very good sign -- I am absorbing enough of the book even without knowing the language well, for it to be on my mind when I'm not reading it. When the narrator noted that Will's knife could cut between worlds but could not "abolish distance within worlds," I immediately flashed on Melquíades' statement that "la ciencia ha eliminado las distancias"; and when Will's boots were sinking into the soft sand in the hot, humid new world, my mind jumped to "aquel paraíso de humedad y silencio,... donde las botas se hundían en pozos de aceite humeante..."
posted evening of January 28th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
 So I found this disc, Sabrina's Holiday, in amongst a bunch of other music I haven't listened to in a long time. It's beautiful! And I have no memory of where I got it, no memory of having listened to it before.
I contacted Rique Prince, the band's fiddler, and he said "Oh wow, one of the old hand-stamped copies of our disk!" -- they have in the mean time released a commercial pressing and recorded a second album, I Thought You Knew. Check 'em out! They have several videos up on YouTube.
 Also found this web site: Black String Revival is a documentary featuring the Ebony Hillbillies and the Carolina Chocolate Drops. The site does not look like it's been updated in a year or so; I have no idea whether the project is ongoing. Either way, there are some useful links on the site. The filmmaker is John Whitehead of Fretless Films, looks like he has some other interesting projects in the works as well. Update: Mr. Whitehead says the project is a labor of love, still in production and he is hoping to begin screening it this spring. Fingers crossed!
posted evening of January 27th, 2009: 2 responses
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As long as I'm posting some nice visuals:
Hermano Cerdo links today to Olivier Kugler's site -- I'd never heard of Kugler but I'm a fan now. The image above is from Kugler's travel diary documenting a (circuitous) trip from the Shetlands to Cuba; and there's a whole lot of other stuff too.
posted evening of January 27th, 2009: Respond
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A spectacular view, from Maui:
 Daily astronomy pictures from NASA. (Thanks for the link, Dad!)
posted evening of January 27th, 2009: Respond
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Finalists for 3%'s 2008 awards are announced today for fiction and poetry. The fiction list includes a couple of books that are on my reading list, nice; and I'm glad to see Death with Interruptions did not make the list -- it seemed out of place on the long list. Interesting stuff in poetry too.
posted morning of January 27th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, January 26th, 2009
David Goldblatt writes in last Sunday's Times an account of picking up the pieces after his widowed father was stabbed to death in 2001. The paperwork first arrived in plastic sacks, and putting it into some kind of order had helped. It felt like an act of salvage. That was the easy bit; then it stopped helping. My partner, Sarah, said: "Are you sure you want to open the boxes? You know what happens when you open the boxes... and... I just wonder if it's helping any more."
Goldblatt's story of sorting and reading through his father's papers is really gripping and gave me a feeling of intimacy with both the father and the son. Well worth the reading. (Link via the Apostropher.)
posted evening of January 26th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, January 25th, 2009
Tonight Sylvia and I started in on the final book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. Just at the outset I noticed Mrs. Coulter's monkey dæmon doing two things that I hadn't seen other characters' dæmons doing before this. One is eating; when the monkey is introduced on the second page, he is picking apart pinecones to get the sweet nuts. Dæmons have never been shown yet eating; I was sort of assuming that as spiritual beings (or as expressions of their humans' spirits) they did not need to. The other is acting as a sort of babelfish -- when Ama tries to speak to Mrs. Coulter in her own (unspecified but not fully understood by Coulter) language, Mrs. Coulter instead has Ama's dæmon speak to the monkey, and there is no linguistic barrier to this kind of communication. So, huh. These are two pretty big deals, especially the second, and I wonder why neither one has come up in the trilogy to date. The language thing would be one (incomplete) way of answering the question I asked earlier about communication in this world. But if dæmons can do that, why are there language barriers at all? Possibly (a) only the golden monkey can do this -- he has repeatedly been characterized as different from other dæmons -- or (b) only Mrs. Coulter knows that dæmons can do this.
posted evening of January 25th, 2009: Respond
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 Happy Year of the Ox, everybody! We're going to spend the afternoon at the local FCC party.
Update: Ellen took pictures of the party -- they're at the READIN family album.
posted morning of January 25th, 2009: 1 response
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At emol.com there is a site dedicated to Cien Años de Soledad -- it is a Flash application so  I can't link to pages inside it; but if you click "Entrar" and watch the lovely video of mariposas amarillas, and then click "Fragmentos", several recorded readings of passages from the book are available, along with the text being read. Following each reading is some discussion of the passage; I am not understanding Spanish well enough yet to follow that.
Another useful page is Macondo at The Modern Word -- a huge trove of links and information about the author and his works.
posted morning of January 25th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 24th, 2009
Edmond Caldwell responds with some very thoughtful commentary to my post on Baroque fiction. I was happy, and a little surprised, to see that what I have in mind and am venturing to express as "Baroque" is broadly similar to what he was thinking about when he used the term last month.
The only place where I might depart from you've written is in the idea that this entails a canceling out individual "free-will" (if I'm even correct that that is what you're saying; forgive me if I've got it wrong), because I think that's still looking at the situation through the old humanist lens (in which it's an either/or question, one either has self-originating "free will" or one is subject to iron determinism, like a puppet). I think the baroque sentence is more dialectical than this; that human agency is deeply or even thoroughly conditioned means perhaps not that it doesn't exist but that it is more collective than we thought. This is a good point and makes me realize that I wasn't thinking clearly this morning when I tried writing about the fatalism in Of Love and Other Demons. Of course there is not a binary distinction between "human actors possessed of free will" on the one hand and "pre-programmed robots" on the other -- there is a pretty broad spectrum of how self-directed a character's actions can seem. (And of course I am getting uncomfortable talking on and on about characters with or without free choice, without acknowldeging that there is an author behind them making the decisions...) I really liked Mr. Caldwell's idea (if I'm understanding him right) that the individual characters in this type of novel can be seen as being subsumed in a kind of collective consciousness which is directing their actions.
posted evening of January 24th, 2009: 2 responses
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