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Saturday, March 20th, 2010
Reading both "The Secret Miracle" and "Three Versions of Judas" -- I am identifying strongly with the main characters (HladÃk and Runeberg) -- but instead of identifying with the narrator, I am identifying the narrator as Borges -- the "position of the reader" in which I find myself,  is listening to him telling a story. (This reminds me of how much I enjoyed reading his lectures, picturing him addressing the class.) The third person works very well here. These two stories go together very well, and are moderately distinct from the rest of the fictions -- both are strongly dependent on religious content*; both narrate the composition of a work which vindicates the main character -- HladÃk's "grand invisible labyrinth," Runeberg's heresy -- and the character's death. "The Secret Miracle" seems to me the closest in style to Poe of any of Borges' fictions.
 *I was going to call them "deeply religious," but I don't think that's quite right -- Runeberg is "deeply religious," HladÃk's experience is one of religious ecstasy; understanding each story requires a willingness to identify with religious sentiment but not, I think, any personal commitment to religious thinking. I have always assumed Borges was an atheist (and a lapsed Catholic) but I don't know if that is accurate.
posted morning of March 20th, 2010: Respond
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Friday, March 19th, 2010
Hladik's first emotion was simple terror. He reflected that he wouldn't have quailed at being hanged, or decapitated, or having his throat slit, but being shot by a firing squad was unbearable. In vain he told himself a thousand times that the pure and universal act of dying was what ought to strike fear, not the concrete circumstances of it, and yet Hladik never wearied of picturing to himself those circumstances.
"The Secret Miracle"
posted evening of March 19th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, March 18th, 2010
 At the beginning of every episode of Heimat: eine deutsche Chronik, before the titles (every episode so far, excluding the first -- I'm watching the fifth now) there is a short piece of narration in English while the camera pans over a set of old photographs of the characters in Schabbach. This was kind of jarring to me at first -- it is not explained, the narrator still has not been identified. The only character who has emigrated to the U.S. is Paul, and the narrator refers to Paul in the third person... Looking at the screenplay I see the narrator identified as Glasisch, who (I believe) is still in Schabbach at the present moment, 1938 or so. This is (assuming I haven't missed some key bit of exposition) a pretty complex piece of plotting -- the viewer knows Glasisch as a character, and knows the narrator as a Schabbacher who has emigrated, but does not know they are the same. Presumably that will be revealed at some point.
 Update: At the beginning of episode 8, the narrator says "The war memorial was unveiled in 1920. I was there -- there I am, that's me!" as he points to a picture of Glasisch.
posted evening of March 18th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
The metaphysicians of Tlön seek not truth, or even plausibility -- they seek to amaze, astound. In their view, metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy.
What really got my attention in Josipovici's piece Borges and the Plain Sense of Things, was his focus on the postscript to the story, on the narrator's experience of Tlön infiltrating and disintegrating our world. I see now that I have in the past read this story as if it were written by a Tlönian metaphysician, as a work of fantasy: my understanding of the story has been twofold, of Borges asking me to imagine a world where idealism is the obviously correct way to understand reality and a human conspiracy to invent such a world, and of Borges asking me to imagine this invented world overtaking our own. But I've been missing, or not paying enough attention to, a third aspect of this (vast) story, how Borges the narrator feels about this alteration of reality. (Maybe I should have been tipped off by Borges' footnote #2, in which he refers to Russell's idea that the world could have been "created only moments ago, filled with human beings who 'remember' an illusory past." It has never been very clear to me what this note is doing in the story; but it could certainly be there to tie the thought-experiment in to the present moment in history from which Borges is writing.)Speaking of footnotes -- one of the things that is great about this edition of the fictions, is Hurley's painstakingly researched, unobtrusive endnotes. They are easily ignorable when you want to read the story without interruption; and they add a whole lot when you read the story with interruptions. I am taken aback to find that all of the people named in this story (excluding, perhaps, Herbert Ashe) -- Carlos Mastronardi, Néstor Ibarra, Alfonso Reyes, Xul Solar, etc. -- are real figures from Borges' milieu, and very interested at some of the books referenced. And this does not come from Hurley's notes -- but I was very happy to learn that there really is an Anglo-American Cyclopædia from 1917, which really is a reprint of an older edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.
posted evening of March 17th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
Gabriel Josipovici's essay on "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" has prompted me to go back and take a look at Borges' fictions (and to check out from the library the Collected Fictions, and to be confirmed in my impression of Hurley's translations as pitch-perfect, and to resolve to buy the volume.) One thing I'm noticing -- making very slow progress, with a lot of re-reading -- is that the  identification-with-other that I like so much in most of the fiction I read is not present so strongly in Borges. The narrators are identifiably Borges -- the only case I've noticed so far where this is untrue, "Man on Pink Corner," is a comparatively weak story, it feels like he is trying too hard. This is not a short-coming, precisely; in some stories like "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" or "The Shape of the Sword," it is exactly the right thing. But it it really noticeable, and striking, for instance in "The Library of Babel" -- the narrator cannot be a denizen of the Library, else how would he have any knowledge of the books and languages he names, but must instead be Borges imagining himself in that situation. I as a reader get to identify with Borges but not, or only at second hand, with the nameless man who wanders endlessly through the Library. It is a long time since I've read most of these stories, and I am still in the early part of the collection -- I will try and keep an eye out for whether this style of narration continues throughout.
posted evening of March 16th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, March 14th, 2010
I went to see Alice in Wonderland with Sylvia this afternoon. (That is to say, "Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 3-D"...) I was kind of expecting not to like it, based on a general inbred aversion to commercializing the classics and on a negative review I had read in the NY Times; but it won me over, mostly. Burton really succeeded in completely imagining the world of the movie, with gorgeous photography and animation; the world of Carroll's books was present but Burton was not tied in to imitating it, and there was a reason given in the screenplay for why this was so -- the world of the books was assumed as part of the background of the world of the movie. (I also really enjoyed the use of 3-D in this film, maybe moreso than any other 3-D movie I've been to so far.) I had a hard time getting fully inside the movie, but I'm blaming my own blinders for that rather than the director's vision -- I set out trying to find fault, and spent too much of my time internally carping about how it was not that way in the book, instead of letting myself go. (And to be sure, the adaptation of the elements of Carroll's plot to a Narnia-style battle between forces of good and evil is heavy-handed, there's no getting around that -- part of the letting myself go that I did intermittently was laughing at the sillyness of this, so that I could get into it.) Sylvia was not doing this kind of nit-picking, and she paid it what seems to me like the ultimate compliment on our way out of the theater, that you could really tell Burton had read the book before he made the movie.
posted afternoon of March 14th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Pictures from our trip to DC at the end of February, specifically from our visit to the National Zoo. Wallaby, emu, pony, anemones, urchin, pandas (both Giant and Red), monkeys and apes, large reptiles, and an utterly stunning giant salamander.
posted afternoon of March 13th, 2010: Respond
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 At work, I've been involved in a project to support the full Unicode character set in a more-than-cursory way*, getting to understand wide characters and utf-8 much more fully than I ever did before; and finally I am thinking I want to encode READIN in utf-8. All this time it has been in ISO-8859-1, which works ok as long as I escape unsupported Unicode characters; but it seems like time to get with the program.
My question is, what's the easiest way to convert my data? A lot of posts have got characters like äöüæ... which are going to show up as garbage if I just change the encoding of the blog. I was thinking I would use mysqldump and use iconv to convert the data. But somehow the output from mysqldump is already encoded with utf8. Does this mean I can just rebuild the database from this output and I'll be good to go? I'm a little confused why mysqldump is not respecting the encoding in the database...
 Well, restoring from the output of mysql-dump does not have the desired effect; characters that were ISO-8859-1 in the original db, that were UTF-8 in the dump, are converted back to ISO-8859-1 in the restore. After further investigation, it seems like my original idea will work: although it looks to me like iconv is essentially double-encoding the characters that were transformed to utf-8 by mysqldump, when I load them back into mysql I get utf-8 characters. Not totally comfortable with this yet...
* (Previously our support for Unicode had consisted of walking through utf-8 strings looking for high-order characters we recognized, and flattening them to 7-bit ASCII.)
posted morning of March 13th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, March 11th, 2010
It contributes something to a reading of Middlesex, to ask how well Cal knows the stories he is telling. Much of the book is told in something similar to a third-person omniscient voice, scenes where Cal simply couldn't know the things he is telling, and the obvious conclusion is that he's making them up, embroidering details into his scant family history. Occasionally he cops to this, saying e.g. "...And now I have to enter Father Mike's head, I'm afraid. I feel myself being sucked in and I can't resist." (What a great idea it is to make Father Mike be the scam artist.) Other times the embellishments are just presented as part of the story. Cal's desire for an integral back-story to his life, a history without holes, makes a really compelling framework for the book.
posted evening of March 11th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, March 8th, 2010
In the long, slow third part of Middlesex, there is a strong sense of building towards a climax. Calliope was born at the beginning of the third part; and the narrative arc is moving deliberately toward her coming of age and becoming Cal -- as she grows the the tension is increasing constantly. There's some tension between the narrated character of young Callie -- who does not know what's going to happen -- and the narrator himself, who has told us well in advance what is happening. I'm waiting with bated breath to find out how it happens. A comparison that's flickered across my mind a couple of times is to the character of Oskar in The Tin Drum -- I don't remember how clearly Oskar-the-narrator laid this out, but it seems to be understood that young Oskar is clairvoyant, that he knows from the beginning about how his life is going to play out.
posted evening of March 8th, 2010: Respond
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