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March 26, 2009
On Gustave's Shelves
Des erreurs et des préjugés répandus dans la société.
Publiés à Paris en 1810 et 1811, par F. Buisson, libraire rue "Gille-Coeur" [Rue Git-le-Coeur], ce sont les oeuvres d'un certain Jean Barthélémy Salgues, né en 1770 et mort en 1830.
Les animaux sont très présents (ce qui est normal, les hommes vivaient en leur compagnie) et doués de pouvoirs mystérieux. Voici quelques unes des interrogations qui hantent les esprits :
- L'araignée annonce t-elle de l'argent ?
- Les abeilles ont-elles un Roi ?
- Les Abeilles piquent-elles de préférence les dames qui manquent à leurs devoirs ?
- Les vieux coqs pondent-ils des oeufs ?
- Les sangsues ont-elles le don de prophétie ?
- Une piqûre de tarentule fait-elle danser comme les meilleurs danseurs de l'opéra ?
From Pages napoléoniennes.
From a bulletin: "En 1853, de plus, Flaubert lit pour Madame Bovary un ouvrage de la bibliothèque paternelle: Des erreurs et des préjugés répandus dans la société, de Jacques-Barthélemy Salgues (Paris, Vve Lepetit, 1811-1813), qui semble avoir inspiré certains articles du Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues."
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Hétérogénie; ou, Traité de la génération spontanee, basé sur de nouvelles expériences (1859)
Cet ouvrage est le fruit de trois années d'expériences et de recherches incessantes. Lorsque, par la méditation , il fut évident pour moi que la génération spontanée était encore l'un des moyens qu'emploie la nature pour la reproduction des êtres, je m'appliquai à découvrir par quels procédés on pouvait parvenir à en mettre les phénomènes en évidence : là fut la tache
laborieuse. (...)
La question de la génération spontanée a divisé les savants en deux camps opposés, et les hommes les plus illustres ont pris part aux luîtes animées et incessantes auxquelles ce grave sujet a donné lieu depuis tant de siècles. La victoire est encore indécise; aussi reste-t-il quelque gloire à conquérir pour celui qui la fera pencher de son côté.
Pour nous, nous combattons à l'abri d'une bannière bien respectable et bien imposante, puisque déjà, dans l'antiquité, elle portait les noms d'Anaxagore, de Leucippc, de Démocrite, d'Épicure, d'Aristote, de Pline, de Lucrèce et de Diodore de Sicile; et que depuis la Renaissance jusqu'à nos jours, on a vu successivement inscrire ceux de Rircher, Rondelet, Aldrovande, Matthiole , Fabri , Bonanni, Burnet, Gassendi, Morison, Dillen, BufTon, GuéneaudeMontbéliard, Needham, Priestley, ïngsnhousz, Gleichen, Stenon, Baker, Wrisberg, Fray , Werner, 0. F. Muller, Braun, Pallas, Rudolphi, Bremser, Goeze, Nées d'Esenbeck, Eschricht, Unger, Allen Thomson, de Lamélherie, Cabanis, Lavoisier, Lamarck, Saint- Amans, Turpin Desmoulins, Latreille, Bory Saint- Vincent, Dumas, Dugès, Eudes Deslonchamps, Gros, Tiedemann, Treviranus, Bauer, J. Muller, Burdach...
(I love the "I can't be wrong since all these clever people think like me" argument.)
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Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, dans le milieu du quatrième siècle avant l'ère vulgaire
En 1788, l'abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (1716-1795), philologue, publia les Les Voyages du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, un récit de voyage détaillé et érudit décrivant les sites et la géographie de la Grèce classique (une version française de la Description de la Grèce de Pausanias).
Quel vide dans tout ce qu'il fait! que de variétés et d'inconséquences dans ses penchants et dans ses projets! Je vous le demande : qu'est-ce que l homme?
Je vais vous le dire, répondit un jeune étourdi qui entra dans ce moment. îl tira de dessous sa robe une petite figure de bois ou de carton, dont les membres obéissaient à des fils qu il tendait et relâchait à son gré. Ces fils, dit-il, sont les passions qui nous entraînent tantôt d'un côté et tantôt de l'autre; voilà tout ce que j'en sais. Et il sortit.
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(found while creating Flaubert's Legacy Library at Librarything; darn George Sand and her overabundant writings, I thought they'd never end)
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March 23, 2009
Quick thoughts and a reading list
 | Expediente del Atentado, Alvaro Uribe I have this feeling only latin americans excel at building narratives around failures. This is a captivating book: an imaginary file of paper clippings, diaries, letters related to the failed murder attempt of Mexico's dictator Porfirio Diaz. It strikes me as a serious, more literary sibling of Jô Soares' Twelve Fingers. Found via Passou. |
 | La petite Bijou, Patrick Modiano It's so sad and beautiful. After reading his bio I have the feeling this is the type of writer who writes the same story over and over again. It becomes more art than literature, if there is such a distinction. Recommended by Amazon.fr through Régis Jauffret's Microfictions. |
 | Beaumarchais in Seville, Hugh Thomas Beaumarchais had such an adventurous life that it's actually possible to write a short book about only a couple of years he spent in Madrid. I wish there were more books like this: edifying entertainment. Found through the LRB's recommended books. |
 | The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt It reads like an old mad professor telling you a bedtime story. This is History pre-"Nouvelle Histoire" and pre-"identification of sources required". My version has no footnotes and more than once I'm amused by the way the author just alludes to people and events as if he's expecting his audience to be perfectly familiar with the more obscure details of his subject. I love it. Where else would I find out about Ferrante of Napoli's room of mummies of his murdered enemies or that Attila was murdered by Dardanus who hit him with a chessboard? And even if this isn't true, I much prefer Burkhardt's version. Found in the National Gallery Bookshop. |
 | Lord Cucumber, Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell All I knew about this pair was something about defacing library books, a penchant for dark humor and a real life murder tragedy. This book must be the most highbrow mix of camp and classical british comedy I've ever read. Suffice to say that the characters end up on a cruise of the Odyssey's locations. Classic gay fiction with homeric reference to boot. Seen on the local library shelf. |
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Ko Un
I was browsing an anthology of middle eastern and asian poetry and fell in love with one of Ko Un's zen poems. I didn't memorize it - which just goes to show how relying on Google is a bit like storing phone numbers in cell phones: the result is a memory not exercised. Arriving home, I looked it up and what I found didn't quite match. I didn't remember the precise words but the image conjured by this version was all wrong.
I have spent the whole day talking about other people again
and the trees are watching me
as I go home.
So, today I went back to the bookshop and this time I've got it.
I spent the whole day being someone else's story again
As I journey homeward
The trees are watching me
Much better.
I wonder if this is a case of poetry which improves on the original with a certain type of translation like Cavafy's.
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March 21, 2009
Claire's Knee
As Roger Ebert said: ""Claire's Knee" is a movie for people who still read good novels, care about good films, and think occasionally.
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March 13, 2009
I "inherited" a box of diaries which belonged to my grandfather. In fact I seem to be the official family archive - my uncle and aunt saying "you keep that, you're the one who always cared about trinkets and mementos" while we cleared my grandmother's place after she died and as a I salvaged valueless chinese cups and saucers, my grandparent's wedding night linens, boxes of old eyeglasses, newspaper clippings.
The diaries run from the late 30's - when he came home after being stationed in Macao - to the early 70's after he moved from the south of Portugal to Lisbon with all the family. They're impressive and scary. My grandfather obsessively noted down on each day the time he started working, times spent having lunch and at what time he stopped working. This was Portugal in the 40's and 50's, under a petty dictator that glorified poverty, and he was working from 4 am to 10 pm almost every day. On the good days he wouldn't start until 8am and he'd be home by 7pm. He was a truck driver, delivering groceries all over the country and sometimes in Spain. I remember my grandmother feeling aggrieved that he never got any overtime payed. When the revolution came and, with it, rights for workers, I think she secretly kept the illusion that if there was any justice in the world they would be able to receive what they were, at least morally, owed. I think that's why she held to this absurd registry of punch ins and outs. That day obviously never came but knowing that the situation wouldn't be that bad ever again was at least comforting.
Reading those timekeeping records really breaks my heart. For a number of reasons but foremost because I know his children loved him dearly and were thus deprived of his company. But by the end of the sixties, when he moved to Lisbon and became a private driver, his schedule was more relaxed and he started noting down mainly what he had had for lunch that day. Occasionally the stress went up and he'd note down times and addresses where he would pick up his employer, a well known lawyer.
It fascinates me how much I can read into these simple annotations, apparently giving no clue to his private thoughts.
By the time he retired, he still kept diaries. But there were no more working hours, no obligations. So he started copying meanings of words from the dictionary (an orange thick volume of which I am also the keeper still). I guess he was a pioneer of the concept of "word of the day". Eventually he moved to notebooks since his schedule-free life didn't ask for any more diaries. I also keep finding, to this day, random pieces of paper torn down from newspapers with scribbled word meanings on them inside the dictionary and inside other books. He became a compulsive Dictionary-phile.
There is one diary, however, from 1959, in which he noted down a quotation which to this day I'm not sure what was the intended meaning of. It's something in the lines of "Even if God didn't exist, religion would go on being holy and divine. God is the only creature that doesn't need to exist to rule." I never understood if this was an atheist's lament or a misguided religious excuse*. And I certainly don't know what grandfather thought of it other that he found it remarkable enough to jot it down. I wonder if he was wondering about God's existence as he drove a truck heavy with bags of refined sugar through the night?
*So, I did the obvious just now. I googled it. It's from Baudelaire's Journal Intime.
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Unfinished theses
The Romanticizing of Motherhood: how men are being shut off from equality in parenting by self defeating pseudo-feminism.
inspired by: essay about breastfeeding in the Atlantic and all the feminist movements who strive to accentuate the differences between the sexes rather than what binds us together. And a conference I once attended where the chief apron wearing person of the Portuguese Freemasonry (I forget the title) said women weren't allowed in because they already contained in themselves the secret of life (undervaluing semen is fair game when it comes to prejudice).
*****
The animistic stockbroker: how the stock market is fueled by superstition disguised as statistics and by the need for symbolic milestones to transmogrify a Bear into a Bull.
inspired by: stocks soar as Maddoff pleads guilty and, as some financial news agency put it, "marking the end of a negative cycle". Also, the superbowl indicator, irrational fear of the month of October, "Madoff rally", "Obama bear market", etc, etc.
*****
Analyzing the contemporary Portuguese essay: is the lack of writers who actually get to the point an exercise of subtlety as a narrative style or is it a historical product of repression?
inspired by: reading an article in a portuguese magazine from 1968 and realizing that the subtle allusions, use of irony and noncommittal about anything, essential for it to clear the censorship office, made the piece completely unreadable. Which pretty much describes a big chunk of opinion pieces in newspapers these days, minus the censorship office. The thesis should be inconclusive and vague.
*****
Hacking Ecclesiastes: keeping God out of Epicureanism.
inspired by: reading that some think the pious, ominous bits were introduced by an editor to compensate for the continual doubt about the fairness of God's justice and appeals to joy, making it look like it was written by a very confused person.
*****
The end of the football club: how eventually supporters as emotional stakeholders will realize they are not supporting the team but cheering for a publicly traded company. It's just as ridiculous as wishing that Bayer will have bigger profits than Merck when you're not even a shareholder but only someone who is hooked on aspirin.
inspired by: one of the best bits of sports journalism I've seen in a long time. The need for sponsorship is having ridiculous outcomes. The football stadiums are named after insurance companies rather than named after great players (and then in smaller print, "sponsored by company X", as decency would have it) but some might argue that it's all business after all. Which leads to my pet hate of that thing Tate Modern calls the Unilever series. I swear the first time I saw it, it meant they were selling ice creams and detergents in the Turbine Hall. And I suppose I was right.
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March 08, 2009
Edmund Crispin proved to be a clever, if lucky, choice. R. read The Moving Toyshop out loud to me in the evenings last week and there were times he had to stop for a few minutes while we laughed. The crafting of the plot around the crime is not what we would call a real master's work but the quips, literary references and pure farcical action make it a gem (also, there is a certain satisfaction in finding out that the murderer is the character who loves Jane Austen). The detective is a Professor of English Literature at Oxford, Gervase Fen, and every other character seems to have strong opinions about literature: the police constable tries incessantly to discuss Measure for Measure with the detective, there's a will which involves Edward Lear's nonsense rhymes, and two gangsters whose identity is unknown are named Scylla and Charybdis by Fen. Also, whenever the hero and his sidekick get stuck or imprisoned, they start playing literary games to pass the time such as listing unreadable novels or naming hateful novel characters that were originally portrayed to be lovable. Which started our classic household discussion since R. added Anna Karenina to the list and I jumped in her defense.
*****
Schwob to dinner.
Daudet told us this. He was having dinner at Victor Hugo's . The great poet of course presided, but in isolation, at one end of the table. He was almost deaf, and no one spoke to him, the guests gradually drawing away, toward youth, toward Jeanne and Georges (his adult grandchildren). He had practically been forgotten, when suddenly, at the end of the meal, the voice of the great man with the bristling beard was heard - a deep voice, coming from afar: I didn't get any cake!
--from The Journal of Jules Renard, a mix of high brow gossip and clever aphorisms.
*****
I love Patrick Caulfield for sentimental reasons. It reminds me of Herge's ligne claire and that brings back childhood memories.
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March 07, 2009
Are you the Messiah or what?
(this reads better with a new york jewish accent)
"(John the Baptist's envoys) said unto him (Jesus), Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?"
Matthew 11:3
Jesus replied, "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cured, the deaf hear, the dead rise, and the good news is preached to the poor."
MAtthew 11:4,5
(what more do you want!?)
To be perfect, they should ask "yes, yes, yes, but are YOU the Messiah?"
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March 06, 2009
A break from the world of claudia; a bit of the real world
Either I have a short memory (or was half-asleep at that particular history of economic thought class which is improbable because an attractive lecturer -which was the case - is always a good motivator to open your eyes and ears) or I had never heard of Pigou.
Either way, I've been defending his theory lately without knowing it was his.
(also, these days, I'm so proud I went to a Keynesian college)
*****
However, Keynes can be our savior only to a very partial extent, and there is a need to look beyond him in understanding the present crisis. One economist whose current relevance has been far less recognized is Keynes's rival Arthur Cecil Pigou, who, like Keynes, was also in Cambridge, indeed also in Kings College, in Keynes's time. Pigou was much more concerned than Keynes with economic psychology and the ways it could influence business cycles and sharpen and harden an economic recession that could take us toward a depression (as indeed we are seeing now). Pigou attributed economic fluctuations partly to "psychological causes" consisting of
variations in the tone of mind of persons whose action controls industry, emerging in errors of undue optimism or undue pessimism in their business forecasts.[5]
It is hard to ignore the fact that today, in addition to the Keynesian effects of mutually reinforced decline, we are strongly in the presence of "errors of...undue pessimism." Pigou focused particularly on the need to unfreeze the credit market when the economy is in the grip of excessive pessimism:
Hence, other things being equal, the actual occurrence of business failures will be more or less widespread, according [to whether] bankers' loans, in the face of crisis of demands, are less or more readily obtainable.[6]
Despite huge injections of fresh liquidity into the American and European economies, largely from the government, the banks and financial institutions have until now remained unwilling to unfreeze the credit market. Other businesses also continue to fail, partly in response to already diminished demand (the Keynesian "multiplier" process), but also in response to fear of even less demand in the future, in a climate of general gloom (the Pigovian process of infectious pessimism).
--excerpt from Amartya Sen's article at the NRB, yet another successful case of clear writing; it would make Feynman proud (he once said that if you really understand something in physics you should be able to explain it to your grandmother)
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March 04, 2009
Sarcasm
(Paul talking to philosophers in Athens)
When they heard about a resurrection of the dead, some began joking about it, while others said, "We will hear you again about this." - Acts 17:32
As in, "Let's talk about it when you resurrect"?
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March 03, 2009
La vie en rouge
When Degas ran out of paint.
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March 02, 2009
The evening bliss
Mendelssohn's Lieder Ohne Worte played by Daniel Barenboim
"People usually complain that music is so ambiguous; that they are doubtful as to what they should think when they hear it, whereas everyone understands words. For me, it is just the reverse. And that is not for while speeches but for single words also: they seem to me so ambiguous, so indefinite, so open to misunderstanding in comparison with real music which fills one’s soul with a thousand better things than words. To me, the music I love does not express thoughts too indefinite to be put into words, but too definite…If you ask me what I thought (in connection with one or another of the Songs without Words), I must say: the song itself as it stands. If, with one or the other of them, I had a specific word or words in mind, I should not like to give them those titles, because words do not mean the same to one person as they mean to another; only the song says the same thing, arouses the same feeling, in one person as in another—a feeling that, however cannot be expressed in the same words…The word remains ambiguous, but in music we understand each other rightly. -- Mendelssohn in a letter (source)
***
Rouge Bourbon tea by Mariage Frères. The best tea in the world.
Grande finesse, thé rouge parfumé à l’arôme de vanille bourbon. Parfum délicat et goût subtil. 100% sans théine. Thé pour les moments agréables.
***
The Drunken Universe - an Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry.
The Persian poetry ends up being more of a set of mind bending puzzles than anything else:
Nonexistence
within existence
is my rule
getting lost
in getting lost
my religion.
(Ayn al-Qozat Hamadani)
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March 01, 2009
In a hidden treasure of a bookshop, upstairs from the tulip-bouquet-carrying mobs of Columbia flower market, beautiful old editions of penguin pocket books line the hallway wall and someone who I presume to be the owner asks a kid - he couldn't have been more than 8 - sitting behind the counter:
Older man: Do we have a copy of the Six wives of Henry VIII?
Child: We did have one. I'll go look, it must be under History.
(runs away, literally, comes back)
Child: I'm afraid to say but we ran out of copies, granddad.
Older man: All right.
I couldn't resist it. I asked for George Orwell's essays. He looked at me and asked if I meant a biography or other writings. No biographies, I answered. He jumped from his stool, ran to the next room and pointed me to "Orwell's England". I'd hire this kid if I was running a bookshop.
Ended up making some entertaining acquisitions. Who can resist buying from a little bibliophile? It's also called buying-on-a-impulse-inspired-by-intriguing-book-titles.
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Entre les murs
Automatic reaction as the ending credits roll by: "I love plotless french movies."
Someone sitting next to me said "you cannot teach like that, this isn't plausible." Obviously he hadn't met my 7th grade Portuguese teacher (or for that matter my 7th grade class from hell) who, in moments of despair, would shout "You Brussel sprouts! You souls in purgatory!". The latter strikes me as a perfect description of that state in between pubescent creatures and teenagehood, now that I think about it. I Still don't know what he meant by Brussels sprouts.
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