November 18, 2009

Prosper

It's such a joy for me to subscribe to Sotheby's auction announcements and to be able to browse their e-catalogues. It's as if I am awarded a glimpse of a beautiful work of art or of a piece of memorabilia that will soon submerge once more into the deep waters of private ownership. Almost in a week's time, they're auctioning off some wonderful items on a Paris book sale. My favourite being a doodle-like self-portrait of Merimée in prison.

Merimée has been lately on my mind ever since I compiled a little guide (self-published on Lulu.com and everything!) for our summer roadtrip in the south of France and realized how much of our sightseeing was provided by his conservation efforts as a Inspector of Monuments. This led me to find more about Merimée and his life which in turn made me want to draw a relationship map of his lovers, friends and acquaintances. I'm pretty sure it would cover a huge part of 19th century France's intellectuals. And through Merimée's biography I discovered Guglielmo Libri. Reading "The life and times of Guglielmo Libri (1802-1869) : scientist, patriot, scholar, journalist, and thief : a nineteenth-century story" is like paging through a bookish thriller, the sort where you end up hoping the bad guy will get away with it - even though he is a book defacer and manuscript robber. In any case, Merimée did side with Libri and that's why he ended up in prison. It's also why Sotheby's has this particular sketch to sell since otherwise, Merimée seems to have been a law abiding citizen.

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July 13, 2009

By the end of the nineteenth century, Florence was a key destination for cultured travellers from Europe and America. Writers such as Wilde, Rilke, and Mann, painters such as Degas and Klee, and, not least, the young art historian Aby Warburg and his wife, Mary, flocked to Florence to escape the encroachments of modern life at home and to revel in the city's rich artistic and cultural past. This beguiling book fuses narrative and ideas to consider how the encounter between modernism and Renaissance culture was experienced by both visitors to Florence and its inhabitants. Based on Aby Warburg's letters, diaries, and notebooks, on Italian and German archives and on conversations with E. H. Gombrich (director of the famous Institute Aby Warburg later founded), the book is an intimate guide to life in Florence and the theatres, restaurants, galleries and salons frequented by visiting cultural exiles. At the same time, the book paints an evocative picture of a city at the cusp of the modern age, adjusting to electricity and the motor car on one hand and to social unrest and a clash of cultures on the other. -- publisher's blurb

****

I want to sing the non-scholarly-bookish-art-amateur praise of Bernd Roeck's "Florence 1900" published by Yale UP. In fact, I liked it so much that I hate myself for already having finished reading it. And for not knowing enough German to read his other books.

It's highly scholarly and yet very readable. Permeated with valuable information - and interesting tidbits - you'll never find anywhere else because Roeck read the unpublished sources (including Aby Warburg's personal papers and a magazine 'Il Marzocco" that I'd kill to get my hands on - preferably translated and annotated). If there's a book that can vividly portray the zeitgeist of any particular era or place this is it.

*******

Meanwhile, I need to keep the links to all the interesting things (so many of them in the public domain!) I've learned via Roeck somewhere, so bear with me.

Leo S. Olschki, Florentine collector and bookseller of Renaissance books and prints.
Found a catalog of his ("Choix de livres anciens rares et curieux en vente à la librairie ancienne Leo S. Olschki (1907)" on archive.org from where this pre-darwinian drawing was taken from.

Charles Godfrey Leland's Etruscan Roman remains in popular tradition; (1892) should be entertaining since the information source for the work of this amateur ethnologist were italian "witches" who accepted money in return for the confirmation that secret worshiping of ancient gods and etruscan magic was still in use in Tuscany in modern times...

Jacob Burckhardt's "The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy. For the Use of Travellers and Students (1879)" is online! Burckhardt was seemingly against the "documenting" of history so it ends up being an entertaining collection of informed opinions. And it was the book everybody at that time used an arts oriented travel guide. Of it Nietzsche enthusiastically said: "It seems to me that one should wake up and fall asleep reading Burckhardt's Cicerone: there are few books that can so stimulate phantasy and prepare one for the conception of the artistic.

The aesthetic sensibilities of an age as seen through the writings about Botticelli in Anatole France's "Le Lys Rouge": "Darling, do you not know it is the custom of Florence to celebrate spring on the first day of May every year? Then you did not understand the meaning of Botticelli's picture consecrated to the Festival of Flowers. Formerly, darling, on the first day of May the entire city gave itself up to joy. Young girls, crowned with sweetbrier and other flowers, made a long cortege through the Corso, under arches, and sang choruses on the new grass. We shall do as they did. We shall dance in the garden."

In Zola's "Rome": "Narcisse for his part had not raised his eyes to the overpowering splendour of the ceiling. Wrapt in ecstasy, he did not allow his gaze to stray from one of the three frescoes of Botticelli. "Ah! Botticelli," he at last murmured; "in him you have the elegance and the grace of the mysterious; a profound feeling of sadness even in the midst of voluptuousness, a divination of the whole modern soul, with the most troublous charm that ever attended artist's work."

People in the quattrocento preferred Gozzoli to Castagno. "the affably conciliatory was preferred to the emotionally impressive" as Aby Warburg put it.

Isolde Kurz's Die Humanisten. Lost manuscripts and monks à la Umberto Eco.

Vernon Lee's "Renaissance fancies and studies (1896)".

Bernard Berenson's essays and catalogues. "Among US collectors of the early 1900s, Berenson was regarded as the pre-eminent authority on Renaissance art. His verdict of authenticity increased a painting's value. While his approach remained controversial among European art historians and connaisseurs, he played a pivotal role as an advisor to several important American art collectors, such as Isabella Stewart Gardner, who needed help in navigating the complex and treacherous market of newly fashionable Renaissance art. In this respect Berenson's influence was enormous, while his 5% commission made him a wealthy man." -- from wikipedia

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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."

**********

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.)

Full text.

**********
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.

Full text.

**********

(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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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 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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February 05, 2009

New finds

(copyright Yvonne Mayer / Crafts Study Centre)

I found Lucie Rie through Ipek (who turns out to share my favorite Monty Python skit - which is the more remarkable as it is an obscure one that no one else seems to find funny).

*****

More than once, while browsing the non-fiction section, I can't help thinking that most of the books there would be fine reads as essays. Why ruin it by eliminating brevity?

*****

At the LRB, I always have a nanosecond of excitement when, neck twisted reading spines, I find "Anatomy of Restlessness". The hope that it is a cross between the Anatomy of Melancholy and the Book of Disquiet is shattered as soon as I find out (again) that it is just a good title for some writings on the author's (who I particularly dislike) theories (which don't seem more than whims to me). I wonder why I keep forgetting it exists.

*****

Thanks to Lisa, added Orwell's Diaries to my RSS feeds. Now I can keep track of the eggs myself. Also, I'm reading the Howard Zinn book she brought from Boston which R. says it gives me extra fuel for my fits of outraged, hand waving disgust at the occasional bit of political news.

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January 19, 2009

Let me tell you the one thing I have against Moses. He took us 40 years into the desert in order to bring us to the one place in the Middle East that has no oil! -- Golda Meir

I've started rereading the bible. The first time I read it, I picked a Portuguese version from 1921. The narrator's voice in my head was an old catholic priest which I pictured looking at me menacingly, his reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose, his index finger a gun ready to fire. Which is obviously not fun and even a little scary since the classic catholic seminary speech style is also guilt inducing. This time, I'm reading the King James version. When I read it in english the narrator's voice belongs to a New York jew. Which makes it seem like I'm reading a script from a Mel Brooks movie. Other times it's a David Mamet character talking in that peculiar rhythm and in constant aporia. Now, THAT is fun.

Example (Exodus 17, Mel Brooks plays Moses, Fran Lebowitz plays "the people", the narrator is Jerry Seinfeld):

So they argued with Moses. They said, "Give us water to drink."

Moses replied, "Why are you arguing with me? Why are you putting the Lord to the test?"

But the people were thirsty for water there. So they told Moses they weren't happy with him. They said, "Why did you bring us up out of Egypt? Did you want us, our children and our livestock to die of thirst?"

Then Moses cried out to the Lord. He said, "What am I going to do with these people? They are almost ready to kill me by throwing stones at me."

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December 20, 2008

The Holidays book stack

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July 25, 2008

What's on Mundo de Claudia reading pile

Bouvard et Pécuchet is a treasure. R. has been reading it to me in the evenings, the perfect book to be shared as we follow the two gentlemen through their pursuit of knowledge and from failure to failure in putting it to practice.

The Rest is Noise is the proof that a lenient god exists as he answered my atheistic prayer for a book that would read like a long New Yorker article (the erudite yet accessible ones, not the Obama-is-our-God-and-all-Republicans-are-evil ones).

Carnegie's bio. I dunno, I was in the mood for a high brow excuse to peep into other people's lives. That's what bios are all about, no?

The Death of Virgil. I'm scared of it - shouldn't I be brushing up on my Aeneid beforehand? Thomas Mann says it's one of the most profound and extraordinary experiments to have been undertaken under the form of a novel. Steiner says it's the only genuine technical advance that fiction has made since Ulysses. We'll see.

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July 12, 2008

The latest random annotations

"...They were mostly 'His Master's Voice' and 'Columbia'; the latter, however, although easily pronounced, had only letters, and the pensive doggy was a winner.(...) It took me a least a decade to realize that 'His Master's voice' means what it does: that a dog is listening here to the voice of its owner. I thought it was listening to the recording of its own barking, for I somehow took the phonograph's amplifier for a mouth piece too, and since dogs run before their owners, this label all my childhood meant to me the voice of the dog announcing his master's approach."
--from the essay "Spoils of War", so far the only of Joseph Brodsky's writings I have enjoyed, a poignant account of his childhood and youth in the USSR and the meaning of foreign objects left behind by Americans after the WWII in his life.

---

"Dearer to me than a host of base truths
is the delusion that enobles us." -- AS Pushkin

---

"il n'y a de bonheur que dans les voies communes" - Chateaubriand

---

"I hear from people who have seen you that you are becoming stout, optimistic and genial - in other words, Americanized. I believe that I had already noticed traces of this in your letters, and I'm not sure I entirely approve."

Edmund Wilson's letter to Vladimir Nabokov, 14 Jan 1946

___

"Don't let the smallest chance slip by; you never know until you try."
"If you're a salesman worth the name at all, you can sell razors to a billiard ball."
"The salesman who will use his brains will spare himself a world of pains."
"Well kept hands that please the sight seize the trade and hold it tight, but bitten nails and grubby claws well may give the buyer pause."

maxims from Montague Egg's Salesman Handbook (the other Dorothy L Sayers detective)

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May 12, 2008

Many years ago in Lisbon, my very British-crocheted-tie-and-tweed-jacket-type teacher Simon was telling me how he had gone back to London for a short break and how he made a fool of himself for not remembering the appropriate english terms for the several bank operations he had planned to take care of while there. The teller looked at him as if he was demented - or at the very least as if he had a very limited vocabulary - since with that fine Queen's accent there was no doubt he was an englishman. He concluded, "Not only do I speak a poor Portuguese, I'm beginning to forget my own language!".

I haven't been away long enough to have a similar complaint but, whereas I was before a gold card Amazon.co.uk client (if there was such a thing), I find myself now pining for some Portuguese literature. As they say, I can't get no satisfaction. In the absence of an Amazon.pt, my kind and patient parents brought me exactly what I needed:

A modern classic that I managed to procrastinate reading indefinitely until now; a posthumous work of a famous author; the most recent book by my favorite Portuguese contemporary writer.

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April 05, 2008

"Men, commonplace and ordinary, do not seem to me fit for the tremendous fact of eternal life. With their little passions, their little virtues and their little vices, they are well enough suited in the workday world; but the conception of immortality is much too vast for beings cast on so small a scale." -- A Writer's Notebook by Somerset Maugham

quoted by Julian Barnes on Nothing to be Afraid Of, a book I couldn't put down not out of reading pleasure but of suspense on what would he write next that I couldn't disagree more with. It's a memoir verging on becoming an anthology of quotations by famous novelists and artists about death and dying, as entertaining as any other anglo-saxon memoir and their typically detached accounts of family's eccentricities and anecdotes. Yet, I was appalled to find, even already discounting the different nationalities, generations and gender, that this man has a way of seeing the world that is so alien to me. From small insignificant details like "when you're a child you think your family is unique" - when I was a child I thought every other family was like mine and was very surprised to find they weren't - to his interpretation of Maugham's quote "The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love" which, following a story by Browne, he believes is all about growing older, having everyone die around you until there's no one else to love - as if you'd stop loving the dead.

I hope to outlive Mr. Barnes - and I'm only saying this because he actually addressed me, the reader, asking me to consider that I might die before him. I think it will be very appropriate that on the day he passes away, there will be a book on one of my shelves in which his signature will become a sort of modern relic.

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January 31, 2008

Free association

Tom Zé, "All the eyes" album, Brazilian Musician


And when I brought the razor closer and with my fingers separated the borders of his anus, Estefania, my astonishment knew no bounds. My first thought was that Palinuro mistrusted me and had decided to spy on me; you won't believe this, Estefania, but there, in his anus, Palinuro had an eye.
'It's an optical illusion.' he said.
'No sir, it's an eye.' I answered.
'What colour?'
'Blue.'
'It's the Universal Eye.'
'That's a metaphor,' I said to him, 'And what you have in your arse is no metaphor but a real eye.'
'Are you crazy?'
'No, I'm not crazy. The General's glass eye, which you must have swallowed last night in your drunken stupor'.
--Palinuro de Mexico, Fernando del Paso

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January 27, 2008

The weekend's little pleasures

But a great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction - from those who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are: we should get to "know" them; they should not be "stereotypes", they should "grow" and "develop"; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us. A glance at the thousands of foolish "reader reviews" on Amazon, with their complaints about "dislikeable characters", confirms a contagion of moralising niceness. Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader "couldn't find any characters to identify with", or "didn't think that any of the characters 'grow'". -- James Wood in the Guardian, last Saturday.

This is pretty much an elaboration of what Nabokov said on his Literature lectures. They're also both as truculent:

Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use. -- Nabokov, Literature Lectures

*****

Taking books out of boxes.

*****

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. --Arabya in Dubliners by James Joyce

*****

Roi Vaara, Artist's Dilemma, 1997 (my pic of the London South Bank Centre February leaflet)

Which illustrates perfectly why the cult of the author who researches extensively and writes realistically is actually very non-artistic. A novel is one thing, literature is quite something else.

*****

Um homem que se passeava nu na Praça de S.Marcos em Veneza foi salvo no último momento de ser preso por atentado ao pudor, por um bando de pombas que o vestiram completamente de branco.

As autoridades marítimas investigam o misterioso desaparecimento da linha do horizonte ao longo de toda a costa atlântica.

Levaram-no ao Serviço de Urgências. Perdera a fala subitamente. O médico que o assistiu veio a apurar que ligara as cordas vocais entre si para conseguir escapar da sua prisão interior.

Extractos de A greve dos controladores de voo de Jorge Sousa Braga

(esperando que o Jorge Sousa Braga não se zangue) Here's a probably poor translation:

A man who strolled naked on St. Mark's Square in Venice was saved at the last moment from being arrested for indecency when a flock of doves dressed him in white.

The maritime authority is investigating the mysterious vanishing of the horizon along the whole Atlantic coast.

They took him to the Emergency Room. He had suddenly lost his voice. The doctor who attended to him came to the conclusion that he had tied together the vocal cords to escape his inner prison.

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November 09, 2007

(answering Rui)

I'm currently reading 3 books - in english, alas - so here it goes:

From: "Imbibe! From absinthe cocktail to whiskey smash, a salute in stories and drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, pioneer of the American bar" by David Wondrich (more here).

"Early evidence is lacking, but by the early 1800's Sangaree (usually based on Madeira) is a constant feature in traveler's tales of the Caribbean."

No, I haven't gone alcoholic. These days, I'm fascinated by cocktail trivia and, if may say so, its culture.

***

From: "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem (more here)

"We have plenty of time."

I usually don't read sci-fi but this is too good to be missed.

***

From: "The Tempest" by Uncle Bill

"We are brought to the heart of the matter by the cantankerous assertion, spoken by Miranda, but obviously the thought and vocabulary of her father."

(unfortunately The Tempest is quite a short play so the above is from an essay by George Lamming which is included in my copy)

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October 12, 2007

lessing doesn't care less

Reporters opened the door and told her she had won the Nobel Prize for literature, to which she responded: "Oh Christ! ... I couldn't care less."

"I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot, OK?" Lessing said, making her way through the crowd. "It's a royal flush."

"I'm sure you'd like some uplifting remarks," she added with a smile.

"I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise," Lessing said. "I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off."

She acknowledged the $1.5 million cash award was a lot of money, but still seemed less than thrilled.

"I'm already thinking about all the people who are going to send me begging letters. I can see them lining up now," she said. The phone in her house, audible from the street, rang continuously.

*****

I like her. I don't know if I like her books but now I'm definitely going to read them. Also, I'm hoping her acceptance speech will be a riot.

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October 01, 2007

The Adventures of Claudia in America

This blogger went to the big book sale in San Francisco and all she got was this because she is a narcissist who can't resist it when she sees her own name in print. This completely messes my project of writing "The Book of Claudia" to be added to the bible or to start a new religion, though.

It was a great buy. I'm sure it's not what the author intended but has made me roll on the floor laughing.

"It had been a beautiful night and she loved him more than ever in the morning. 'If it weren't real love', David told her, 'if it were only physical, it wouldn't be that way.'

Claudia, who was eighteen and who did not know very much about love, had the greatest respect for her husband's superior knowledge of sex. Not that he'd ever led a wild life, or run around, but he'd read a great many books on the subject and knew as much as a doctor."

Of course. There's nothing sexier than a gynecologist.

I also "found" and bought the fabulous Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats illustrated by Edward Gorey for 1 dollar and finally got the complete poems of Cavafy, among other cheap finds.

Big. Like everything else here.

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July 07, 2007

Seen at the counter of Skoob books. You can tell when someone starts a second-hand book business out of love: this very persuasive anti-impulse-shopping quote is inconveniently located by the cash register. I almost returned "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to its shelf when I read this.

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May 22, 2007

I wanted to write about...

...the centennial of Hergé and how despite being a Tintinophile I am also a contrarian. Hergé used to say that there was no place for sex or women in Tintin's male friendship world. So I started a post on Tintin porn parodies only to realize this site has a fantastic compilation of bootleg Tintin albums from the 80's and Arte channel aired a great documentary called "La vie sexuelle de Tintin". I also found a couple of bloggers or website owners who got sued (and condemned) for promoting "illegal" Tintin album versions. Which made me want to blog about copyright, civil liberties, the moustache on Mona Lisa, the power of dead people's wishes over the creativity of the living and trash Belgian law but I'm too lazy.

(Roy Lichtenstein is allowed to throw a Matisse painting on Tintin's living room)

...Elias Canetti's Auto da Fé and how if were this book edible it would leave a bitter-sweet taste on my mouth. It's a wonderful bizarre and funny novel, a chimera born of crossing Lynch with Ionesco with a german twist. Alas, the version I own seems like someone pasted the results of Babel Fish "German to English" translation into it (my book says the translation was supervised by the author). Here I am holding what could be one of my favorite novels of all times, wondering if this will be the final trigger to upgrade my current tourist babble german language level. Which made me want to blog yet again about the difficulties of translation, the wonder of learning a new language, post an hilarious excerpt of the novel when the main character tries to convince his books to go to war and faces the opposition of buddhist texts and of Schopenhauer who suddenly found the will to live, quote Walter Benjamin, add an excerpt of Saramago's Baltasar & Blimunda and show you how crappy the english translation is but I'm too lazy.

...Gilbert & George's downloadable art and how the open source paradigm should invade every corner of knowledge, cadavres exquis, the recent trends on how art can be an effective political and social integration tool, how weird that most art reviews I read are favorable and hardly ever anyone dares to say that - although Gombrich says there is no such thing as a bad work of art - that red canvas with a bit of newspaper glued to it brings nothing new and is a lame attempt at originality, the New Yorker article on Banksy and how even the most wannabe rebels give in to money and vanity despite maintaining their anonymity, the Hopper exhibition at the MFA in Boston, the underrated value of art in the developing world and Maslow's hierarchy of needs but I'm too lazy.

...my plans for the second semester of 2007, Cavafy's poems, Socrates' "know thyself", healthy doubts, status quo, Ecclesiastes, Ovid on fishing, missing oneself, the Bloomsbury group, low cost airlines, auction houses, journalism, aging, optimism, adventure, excitement and romance but that would be too personal.

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December 11, 2006

I was thinking how I was such an avid reader as a teenager partly because I wanted to know so many things and books seemed to be the best source for instruction for whatever I didn't know yet, intellectually or emotionally. In part all this reading was helpful, in other ways I suppose I got some prejudices on matters I didn't have enough real experience to have an opinion on. Yes, I was - and I still am - an impatient person. And one of my favourite quotes is still Einstein's "There's nothing as practical as a good theory". Or something like that.

The best part of getting older, book wise, is rereading. If you're fairly smart, you'll understand the book on a first read. For instance, I read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" when I was 17 and thought it was brilliant. I read it again 12 years later. As I finished it, closed it and laid it on the bed of a hotel room in a distant country that smelled of musk & sea & dirt, I put my hand on my forehand and realized how naive I had been. I imagined Milan Kundera, somewhere in France, in a control room filled with TV sets from floor to ceiling, monitoring his readers reactions, spying on me and going: "Ha! Silly girl! Did you think you could grasp the meaning of my book the first time you read it without having been through love & jealousy & desire & heartbreak?"

I wonder what will it tell me if I reread it 10 years from now?

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November 09, 2006

In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki

It can be easily said of this essay that it is a set of jottings about the aesthetic power of darkness. The author's writing is like a stream that runs through architecture, takes a turn into gastronomy, goes swiftly by human beauty and ponders on old age, with a turn of prose so compelling that makes you wish you owned minimalistic decorated japanese house and were reading by candle light.

The considerations on architecture and decoration can be taken as the oriental counterpart to Bachelard's Poetics of Space, taking the way the lived experience of the space is that which matters for his aesthetics and practical purposes.

Tanizaki is a man who can write beautifully about sensuous experiences like sight or taste never losing from sight his theme.

But what exactly is the theme? It seems to me to be a mourning of a traditional way of life, or should we say of lighting, that was quickly disappearing. The view that glorifies darkness which makes lacquer and gold stand out or that softens the whites as opposed to artificial light which makes everything glitter and brings the unbearable brightness can also be just a romantic vision of a lost Japan that never existed. But that really isn't an issue if you are aiming to enjoy this book for its sheer beauty and bits of witty humor.

*****

"It has been said of japanese food that it is a cuisine to be looked at rather than eaten. I would go further and say that it is food to be meditated upon, a kind of silent music evoked by the combination of lacquerware and the light of a candle flickering in the dark."

*****

This edition is lacking a glossary of untranslated japanese terms used throughout.

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October 02, 2006

My theory, which is mine.

I was delighted to read Ricardo's post about Shakespeare and how one astrophysicist is claiming that by studying the astronomic events mentioned on his plays one can determine not the years during which he lived but rather the ones in which he didn't.

Many scholars have been researching the true identity of Shakespeare and there is a strong current in favour of naming Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the true author of the works. Many historians have also presumed he was the secret son of Queen Elizabeth I.

My own pet theory is that the only person to live at that time, that knew all the royal court's intrigues, who was in a position to know about the letter Christopher Hatton, Vice-Chamberlain, wrote to the queen and which is parodied on Twelfth Night, and who had enough time in her hands to come up with so many rhymes, was Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen herself!!!!

But...there's more.

Were Liz and Ed ever seen together in the same room? De Vere was appointed as a royal ward in the household of William Cecil, the Queen's most trusted and closest advisor. De Vere's mother wrote to Cecil:

“I confess that a great trust has been committed to me of those things which, in my Lord’s lifetime, were kept most secret from me”.

My own conclusion? The Queen and the Earl were one and the same person!!!!!! So Elizabeth was a transvestite which can explain why she never married or had any children: she secretly wanted to be a man but at the time there was no such thing as sex change surgery!

Elizabeth posing as De Vere and posing as the Queen

****
There's nothing quite as liberating as making public an outrageous pet theory :)

A special thanks to my research associate Ricardo! We could write a Dan Brown style book on this and make money!

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September 10, 2006

"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method."

--Chapter lxxxii, Moby Dick (Melville)

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September 04, 2006

Library Thing

Having fun lately with Library Thing: "LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth."

Author cloud

That's what I call a social network! Just added the few books on my tiny bookshelf and some others piling around. I miss my stored-in-the-basement-of-a-friend books. Now I'm starting my own online library. Great!

(found it through misteraitch whose blog is such a source of many delights - which lately includes a post with my favourite Xul Solar painting and a mention to Javier Marías - the cause of my sunday El País newspaper obsession.

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June 23, 2006

"I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand serendipity?" --Correspondence, Horace Walpole

"The kaleidoscope (...) has always fascinated me as a metaphor for life: how a seemingly slight incident can alter the course of one's destiny, just as an almost imperceptible shift in the angle of the lens changes the composition to form an entirely new pattern". --"The Cairo House", Samia Serageldin via J Ryder.

"Some dreamed of a new alphabet, a new language of symbols through which they could formulate and exchange their new intellectual experiences." -- "The Glass Bead Game", Hermann Hesse

"If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons, writes Bokonon, that person may be a member of your karass." --"Cat's Cradle", Kurt Vonnegut

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June 05, 2006

XXX, NSFW, shocking content ahead, read this only if you're above 18, etc.

I found out that James Joyce was a coprophiliac through Javier Marías' entertaining little book "Written Lives". The idea of defying the authority of someone by means of ridicule is a dishonest one. But it's so much fun. I personally have a very mean strategy for the very few situations in which I find someone intimidating: if it's a man I picture him wearing nothing but socks and shoes and if it's a woman I imagine her brushing her teeth, drooling toothpaste all over her chin, looking like a dog with rabies. Works every time.

No one is intimidating as soon as you get to know them better.

Time Magazine, Coprophiliac of the year

I was googling for Joyce's letters to Nora Barnacle in order to see for myself if Marías' diagnosis wasn't the fruit of his own dislike of the man - which he bluntly states in the prologue.

"My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or to fling you down under me on that soft belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shame of your upturned dress and white girlish
drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair."

"Have I shocked you by the dirty things I wrote to you? You think perhaps that my love is a filthy thing. It is, darling, at some moments. I dream of you in filthy poses sometimes. I imagine things so very dirty that I will not write them until I see how you write yourself. The smallest things give me a great cockstand - a whorish movement of your mouth, a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers, a sudden dirty word spluttered out by your wet lips, a sudden immodest noise made by you behind and then a bad smell slowly curling up out of your backside. "

And lots more here.

This is perhaps one of the weirdest things I have ever read. The letters are at times beautiful, poetic, erotic, romantic and simultaneously...yucky (to me, at least....a big apology to all the coprophiliacs reading this). I find this insanely funny. I suppose he meant it to be private...tough luck. You're dead, buddy.

(I warned you)

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May 21, 2006

Book Bliss

Associação de Loucos e Sonhadores, Lisboa

(((((())))))

Finally read Vonnegut's SlaughterHouse 5. My mouth is open in amazement. I love the simple and yet powerful and imaginative writing. Fascinated by the Tralfamadorian concept of time. (sighs with pleasure)

Now I can't hear anyone talking about death without thinking: "So it goes".

Can't wait to get my hands on Cat's Cradle.

(((((())))))

One of those happy succession of synchronicities led me to Enrique Vila-Matas. His name came up at least once every day of this past week, through friends, articles in newspapers, referenced in books I was reading and culminated on the happy, thrifty find of a set of 6 of his books for 18 Euros at FNAC.

The sheer erudition of the man. Pure intellectual bliss and aesthetic enjoyment. So happy.

Also, he writes beautifully about Lisboa:

Lisboa es el nada nunca jamás. Lisboa es para llorar, puro destino y llanto, fado y luz de lágrima. Pero al mismo tiempo es una inmersión radical en la alegría. “Otra vez vuelvo a verte, / ciudad de mi infancia pavorosamente perdida /Ciudad triste y alegre, otra vez sueño aquí”. No es la ciudad blanca que creyó ver un suizo equivocado, sino una ciudad azul de alegres nostalgias inventadas.

Lisbon is nothing never ever. Lisbon is for crying, pure destiny and weeping, fado and light of tears. But at the same time is a radical immersion in joy. "I see you once again, / city of my dreadfully lost childhood / Sad and happy city where I dream again". It is not the white city that a mistaken Swiss thought he saw, but a blue city of cheerful invented nostalgia.

The original text is here (in spanish).

(((((())))))

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April 04, 2006

[Marco Polo to Kublai Khan] "I shall repeat the reason why I was describing it to you: from the number of imaginable cities we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unimaginable dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."

"I have neither desires of fears", the Khan declared,"and my dreams are either composed by my mind or by chance."

--Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

"On the banks of a great river in the povince of Cathay there stood an ancient ciy of great size and splendour which was named Khan-Balik, that is to say in our language, "the Lord's City". Now the great Khan discovered through his astrologers that this city would rebel and put a stubborn resistance against the empire. For this reason, he had this new city built next to the old one, with only the river between. And he removed the inhabitants of the old city and settled them in the new one, which is called Taidu, leaving only those whom he did not suspect of any rebellious designs;for the new city was not big enough to house all those who lived in the old." -- Travels in the Land of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo

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March 21, 2006

Great Ideas

Since I still have a pile of books to read, I was avoiding entering any bookshop; ah, the sacrifices I put myself through. But...since I lack the personal discipline to resist temptation, I did go to a bookshop in the weekend and ran into this wonderful set of books: the Great Ideas series published by Penguin. Such cute books with such simple yet beautiful covers. I *had* to bring a few back home with me and as I was chatting about it with the girl at the counter, she stops packing them and says: "Interesting. You just picked the same ones as Paulo Portas who just left some minutes ago". That's the kind of stuff that can ruin my pleasure. Paulo Portas is the former leader of a Portuguese right wing party and one of the last persons in the world I could imagine sharing reading preferences with. I bumped into the guy as I was walking away and I had a glimpse of *my books* inside his transparent plastic bag as he stopped to light a cigarette. He probably thought "Why is this lunatic peeking at my bag and why is she staring at me in disgust?".

On Art and Life, John Ruskin
Travels in the Land of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo
The Inner Life, Thomas a Kempis
On the Pleasure of Hating, William Hazlitt
The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus (had already read that one but couldn't resist the malevichian cover)

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March 20, 2006

Peddling a poet

I was waiting for an exhibition to open and this man comes up to me and asks where the door to the exhibition is.

- It's right here. They open at 3.
- Thank you. Are you a journalist?
(the exhibition took place at a portuguese newspaper gallery and I was standing at the building's front door which, obviously, qualified me for the job)
- No.
- Oh.
(pause)
- You know, there's this great Portuguese poet no one talks about anymore...but I love his work so much. Pessoa used to say that he was the most trascendental of our poets. He was a great man. A fighter for freedom, a scientist, a man of ideas. At a time when the rate of illiteracy was 78% he said this sublime sentence: "There is more light in the letters of the alphabet than in all the firmament".
At this point I'm thinking whether I should give him the "get lost creep" treatment. But I'm a sucker for literature and curious as a cat.
- Who is this poet you're talking about?
- A great man, miss. A great, great man. One of our greatest poets. He's buried at the national pantheon, right next to Amalia. His name was Guerra Junqueiro.
- Oh, I've read "A Velhice do Padre Eterno" by him.
And so I have a new item for my "what not to say to weirdos" list. The man's eyes shined and he didn't leave me alone during the time I was wandering around the Schwitters, Warhols and Paiks.
He's carrying a plastic bag and excitedly takes out a sheet of paper with the poet's quotations which he gives to me.

- I also have here with me xerox copies of the newspaper edition when he died in 1923. He made the front page!
-Thank you (he's now between me and the Jacquet).

Alain Jacquet, Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe (1967)

Manet, Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe (1865)

- He was a great Republican. He fought to bring down that useless monarchy we had...what a man. Here, I have extra copies for you to give to your friends and let him be known to everyone.
(maybe he's founding a new religion)
As I was trying to read Jenny Holzer's electronic-display signboard he comes up to me again.
- You know, he was a man of ideals. He was very active politically, he worshipped freedom but got away from it all when he realized that the parties weren't fighting for the country's benefit but for themselves. He returned to poetry. And today our poets can't get away from politics.
(one of the candidates for last January's presidential elections was a poet)
- Ah.
(and he hands me another sheet of paper with quotations; but this time they're not by Guerra Junqueiro)

What matters most in life is not duration but intensity - Jacques Brel

- You really like culture and art, right?
- Right.
- Good, good. It's important that there is freedom of expression. People should be free to paint and write whatever they feel like. I belong to a very repressed generation. I wish the revolution took place much earlier, we could have avoided a war. It's one of the things I regret the most about my life: to have lived all my youth and adult age under a dictatorship. We have to prevent this from happening again. No more censorship, ever.
(and I'm also a sucker for anti fascists so I'm beginning to like the guy)

He hands me another piece of paper, a xerox copy of a text by Guerra Junqueiro, and walks away.

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February 23, 2006

"Is a translation meant for readers who do not understand the original? This would seem to explain adequately the divergence of their standing in the realm of art. Moreover, it seems to be the only conceivable reason for saying "the same thing" repeatedly. For what does a literary work "say"? What does it communicate? It "tells very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information -- hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information -- as even a poor translator will admit -- the unfathomable, the mysterious, the "poetic," something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet? This, actually, is the cause of another characteristic of inferior translation, which consequently we may define as the inaccurate transmission of an inessential content. This will be true whenever a translation undertakes to serve the reader. However, if it were intended for the reader, the same would have to apply to the original. If the original does not exist for the reader's sake, how could the translation be understood on the basis of this premise?"

-- Walter Benjamin, The task of the translator

++++

Tricky, the art of translating. Isn't it?

Banubula had a great post on the various English versions of a Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer poem.

++++

The young daughter of the Honourable Master had a go at translating AB's poem I posted here.

I'm not sure he sent me this as any flaunty proud father of a talented (Portuguese) 15 year old would or if he means that "Even a junior high school kid can translate this better than you" :-)

Be attentive,
Be attentive to the conquests of your strength.
Tear the new days with what you've learnt from your weaknesses.
Pledge with the chalice of your tears
Hold it high and well.
Never, never detain yourself and cry out the dreams you will capture.
The springs you crave to discover await you.
Always follow the North of your woes.

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February 22, 2006

Reading Yourcenar's biography.

On her reflections on the writing of Hadrian, there's such a beautiful dedication to Grace Frick, her life companion:

"This book bears no dedication. It ought to have been dedicated to G.F., and would have been, were there not a kind of impropriety in putting a personal inscription at the opening of a work where, precisely, I was trying to efface the personal. But even the longest dedication is too short and too commonplace to honor a friendship so uncommon. When I try to define this asset which has been mine now for years, I tell myself that such a privilege, however rare it may be, is surely not unique; that in the whole adventure of bringing a book successfully to its conclusion, or even in the entire life of some fortunate writers, there must have been sometimes, in the background, perhaps, someone who will not let pass the weak or inaccurate sentence which we ourselves would retain out of fatigue; someone who would re-read with us for the 20th time, if need be, a questionable page; someone who takes down for us from the library shelves the heavy tomes in which we may find a helpful suggestion, and who persists in continuing to peruse them long after weariness has made us give up; someone who bolsters our courage and approves, or sometimes disputes, our ideas; who share with us, and with equal fervor, the joys of art and of living, the endless work which both require never easy but never dull; someone who is neither our shadow nor our reflection, nor even our complement, but simply himself; someone who leaves us ideally free, but who nevertheless obliges us to be fully what we are. Hospes Comesque."

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January 20, 2006

A Theory of Contact

I will now turn my sullen mouth to the discussion of meaningless matters:

"I have sometimes thought of constructing a system of human knowledge which would be based on eroticism, a theory of contact wherein the mysterious value of each being is to offer to us just that point of perspective which another world affords. In such a philosophy pleasure would be a more complete but also more specialized form of approach to the Other, one more technique for getting to know what is not ourselves.(...) when each fraction of a body becomes laden for us with meaning as overpowering as that of the face itself, when this one creature haunts us like music and torments us like a problem (instead of inspiring in us, at most, mere irritation, amusement, or boredom), when he passes from the periphery of our universe to its center, and finally becomes for us more indispensable than our own selves, then that astonishing prodigy takes place wherein I see much more an invasion of the flesh by the spirit than a simple play of the body alone."

-- Marguerite Yourcenar, The Memoirs of Hadrian

Such a quotable book. I feel like copying it all to the longest blog post ever written :-)

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January 16, 2006

Lit Quiz

(found in Anne's blog who saw it in Dick's blog who saw it in The Observer)

1. The Bible or Shakespeare?

Shakespeare. I don't find the Bible particularly well written. Maybe except for the Song of Solomon. And some psalms.

And Shakespeare wrote great jokes & great insults. And you don't get sexual innuendo like this in the Bible:

SAMPSON

'Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant: when I
have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the
maids, and cut off their heads.

GREGORY

The heads of the maids?

SAMPSON

Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads;
take it in what sense thou wilt.

GREGORY

They must take it in sense that feel it.

SAMPSON

Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and
'tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.

GREGORY

'Tis well thou art not fish; if thou hadst, thou
hadst been poor John. Draw thy tool! here comes
two of the house of the Montagues.

(Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene I)

2. A word you like

In Portuguese: Oxalá (I think it's an adaptation from the Arabic inch'allah - "may god allow" - but don't listen to me, I didn't even google for the origin of the word)

In English: Flabbergasting (must be said with an affected, British accent). Just because I have fun saying it.

3. Most romantic moment in fiction

If I assume that romantic is something that follows the rules of ideal love...then I choose Romeo and Juliet again. Can't help it.

JULIET

What's here? a cup, closed in my true love's hand?
Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end:
O churl! drunk all, and left no friendly drop
To help me after? I will kiss thy lips;
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them,
To make die with a restorative.

Kisses him

Thy lips are warm.

(Act 5, Scene III)

4. Overrated writer

Dan Brown is the obvious one. Oh wait, a writer. Maybe Coetzee.

(and in my more personal universe I have a not-so-secret-anymore antipathy towards Hemingway)

5. Favourite translation

The recent translation of Homer's Odyssey to Portuguese by Frederico Lourenço. Not that I know Greek but it was the first time I enjoyed reading it. The previous Portuguese translations didn't keep the poetic form.

6. Best meal in English Literature

Not really a meal...but the first time literature made me hungry.

In every "The Famous Five" book by Enid Blyton, they'd never depart for yet another adventure without a basket full of goodies. I was intrigued by the obsessive eating of scones, butter and raspberry jam. I was nine, Portuguese and had no idea what a scone was. But it sounded delicious. And then I came across a recipe for scones on one of my mom's cookbooks...oh, the joy (how did I survive without the Internet?)

7.Underrated writer

Bohumil Hrabal. "Too loud a solitude" is such a fantastic book.

8. Favourite Children's books

As a child: "The Boy Who Was Followed Home" by Margaret Mahy, illustrated by Steven Kellog. A surrealistic story of a boy who starts being followed home every day after school by hippopotami. Increasingly more and more of them.

Now: "The wind in the willows", Kenneth Grahame. Wait! Does the Harry Potter series count as children's books?

9. Book(s) by your bedside now

Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita"
Feynman's "Six Easy Pieces"
David Lodge's "Author, author"

10. Sexiest book

I can't pick one.

For a more poetic approach of eroticism: Anaïs Nin's "Little Birds"
For plain sex: Any Henry Miller's.
For some S&M fun: "Gordon" by Edith Templeton.
Funny and intriguing: Alberto Moravia's "Me and Him" - yes, I find a talking penis sexy :-)

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December 21, 2005

The colors of infamy

"O que mais alegrava Ossama era contemplar o caos. Debruçado ao parapeito da passagem suspensa cujos pilares metálicos rodeavam a praça Tahrir, ele ruminava idéias atrevidamente contrárias aos discursos propagados pelos pensadores oficiais, os quais sustentavam que a perenidade de um país estava subordinada à ordem. O espetáculo que tinha diante dos olhos condenava sem recurso essa afirmação imbecil. Já havia algum tempo que aquela construção, imaginada por engenheiros humanistas para resguardar os infelizes pedestres dos perigos da rua, servia-lhe de observatório panorâmico, reforçando sua íntima convicção de que o mundo podia continuar indefinidamente a viver na desordem e na anarquia." - Cossery, As Cores da Infâmia

"Contemplating the chaos was what cheered Ossama the most. Leaning over the railing of the overpass whose metallic pillars encircled the Tahrir square, he insolently ruminated contrary ideas to the speeches propagated by the official thinkers, which stated that the longevity of a country was subordinate to order. The spectacle his eyes beheld condemned without appeal this imbecile idea. For some time now, that construction, imagined by humanist engineers to protect the unhappy pedestrians from the dangers of the street, served him as a panoramic observatory, strengthening his intimate conviction that the world could indefinitely continue to live in the clutter and the anarchy." - Cossery, The Colors of Infamy

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AP's latest. Inspired by the excerpt above.

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A la question : « Pourquoi écrivez-vous ? », Albert Cossery répond : « Pour que quelqu'un qui vient de me lire n'aille pas travailler le lendemain ».

To the question: "Why do you write?", Albert Cossery answers: "So that anyone reading it won't go to work the next day."

(AP! Stop reading that! You've got a mortgage!)

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Albert Cossery is an egyptian anarchist who is 88 years old and has lived the past 56 years in a hotel room in Paris. He was admired by Henry Miller and Camus and has only written 8 books. It took him 16 years to write "The Colors of Infamy". Sometimes he would write only one sentence a day. As he says, he can't afford to waste any more time on writing because he's having so much fun with other stuff.

More on The Colors of Infamy here.

Posted by claudia Permalink

December 06, 2005

Why Dan Brown should pursue the "Jesus Lived In India" Theory

I read the DaVinci code last year. I was at New Delhi's airport facing a long flight to Frankfurt without anything to read. I rushed to an airport bookshop and bought it. I tend to avoid popular books - it's my intellectual pretentiousness, you see :-) - but it seemed an easy read for a flight and I wanted to see what everyone was talking about.

I enjoyed it immensely. Like I enjoy popcorn-eating-hollywood movies when I'm in the mood for it.

When some friends and colleagues started talking to me about it I was amazed to discover how everyone took it rather seriously ("Dan Brown did a lot of research for it", "There are several historians who say it's a very well written book with solid proof", "maybe it's all true", etc.,etc.)

I had fun reading it. The scholarly, conspiratory tone only made it more fun. Accurate or not, it doesn't matter. Like reading a magazine horoscope. Or it's like reading a much poorer version of some of Arturo Pérez-Reverte entertaining adventure novels.

And I'm not even a religious person, I'm not offended by some of the assumptions the book makes, I was quite amused by them.

So, I was relieved to read this article by Umberto Eco:

"G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

The "death of God", or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church -- from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code.

It is amazing how many people take that book literally, and think it is true. Admittedly, Dan Brown, its author, has created a legion of zealous followers who believe that Jesus wasn't crucified: he married Mary Magdalene, became the King of France, and started his own version of the order of Freemasons. Many of the people who now go to the Louvre are there only to look at the Mona Lisa, solely and simply because it is at the centre of Dan Brown's book.

The pianist Arthur Rubinstein was once asked if he believed in God. He said: "No. I don't believe in God. I believe in something greater." Our culture suffers from the same inflationary tendency. The existing religions just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret "container" with his or her own fears and hopes."

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In the same aiport bookshop I bought another popular book in India: "Jesus lived in India" (synopsis here). It's even more outrageous which makes it even more fun than Dan Brown's fantasies. It's so far fetched I swear I wish it was true :-)

I had read Catherine Clément's "Jesus at the stake" in which she writes about these jesus-lived-in-India theories in fictional terms. I found it very interesting and amusing that Jesus had had tibetan buddhist teachings, survived the crucifixion by practising yoga and fled to Kashmir, dying there of old age. As a secular humanist, it seemed as good explanation as the Vatican's :-). When I went to India I had the chance to ask some Indians about this theory. All of them said: "Of course he lived and died here! Everyone knows that! His tomb is up there in Srinagar...go see it for yourself!" - rather mockingly. Too bad that Srinagar is in Kashmir and that I'm rather cowardly or else I would have gone there.

"Ahmadi Muslims believe that the physical ascension of Jesus to Heaven is a later interpolation. The term "heaven" is used for spiritual bliss which the righteous enjoy after a mortal life.

Jesus was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matt. 15:24). Out of twelve tribes of Israel, only two were in the region where Jesus preached. The other ten tribes, as a result of exile, were domiciled in the eastern countries, especially in Afghanistan and Kashmir. It was imperative for Jesus to migrate eastwards to complete his mission.

There is overwhelming evidence that the people of Afghanistan, Kashmir and neighbouring regions are of Israelite ancestry. Their physical features, languages, folklore, customs, and festivals attest to their Israelite heritage. Evidence also comes from the names they give to their villages, their monuments, and ancient historical works and inscriptions.

The presence of Jesus in India is recorded in the ancient Indian literature, and records of Kashmir. Jesus came to Kashmir from the Holy Land during the reign of Raja Gopadatta (49-109 AD) to proclaim his prophethood to the Israelites. He was known as Yusu (Jesus) of the children of Israel. It is recorded that great number of people recognized his holiness and piety and became his disciples. " - more here.

They're making a documentary on it in India.

"According to legend Jesus Christ's tomb lies at Rozabal in Srinagar's old town . "Rozabal" is an abbreviation of Rauza Bal, meaning "tomb of a prophet". Isa (the Islamic name for Christ) was in fact also known as Yuz Asaf (Leader of the Healed). At the entrance there is an inscription explaining that Yuz Asaf is buried along with another Moslem saint. Both have gravestones which are oriented in North-South direction, according to Moslem tradition. However, through a small opening the true burial chamber can be seen, in which there is the Sarcophagus of Yuz Asaf in East-West (Jewish) orientation.

According to advocates of this theory there are carved footprints on the grave stones and when closely examined, carved images of a crucifix and a rosary. The footprints of Yuz Asaf have what appear to be scars represented on both feet, if one assumes that they are crucifixion scars, then their position is consistent with the scars shown in the Turin Shroud (left foot nailed over right). Crucifixion was not practised in Asia, so it is quite possible that they were inflicted elsewhere, such as the Middle East. The tomb is called by some as "Hazrat Issa Sahib" or "Tomb of the Lord Master Jesus". Ancient records acknowledge the existence of the tomb as long ago as 112AD.

Thus the legend that Jesus Christ Himself is buried in Kashmir!"

More books about it here.

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November 11, 2005

Time gifts

"Do you remember the story about the astronomer?" Without turning around she pointed her thumb to the right to one of the three paintings on the wall. "If it hadn't been for his nighttime visit beore the execution, Lazar would have happily gone to the stake, convinced of how correct, even exalted, his sacrifice would be."
"But it was a mistake. Visiting the future showed him that his sacrifice had no meaning."
"Do you think that people should be freed from their mistakes? Even when it ends up destroying their happiness?"
"Happiness based on illusion, deception?"
"And what happiness isn't?"
He did not know how to reply at first. He felt like a chess player whose opponent had made what seems like a quiet move, but with many traps hidden behind it.
"What is the meaning of happiness if it entails the loss of a life?" he asked at last, in a muffled voice.
"And what is the meaning of life without happiness? That is the impossible choice Lazar was forced to make. With the best intentions. Everything would have been much simpler if he had not seen the future."

--- Time Gifts, Zoran Zivkovic

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November 09, 2005

Lampedusa

"On one occasion, he did not move for four hours, the time it took him to read a large novel by Balzac, from start to finish. Then he would undertake his long tour of the bookshops, after which he would go to another café, where he would sit but not mix with a few acquaintances of his with semi-intellectual pretensions. He would listen to "their nonsense" and hardly say a word, and then, after all these marathon sittings and feeble peregrinations, return home on the bus. He is always described as walking wearily along, looking very distinguished, but with a somewhat careless gait, his eyes alert, holding in his hand a leather bag crammed with the books and cakes and biscuits on which he would have to survive until evening, since lunch was never served at home. He carried that famous bag with great nonchalance, quite unconcerned that volumes of Proust were sitting cheek by jowl with titbits and even courgettes. Apparently the bag always contained more books than were strictly necessary, as if it were the luggage of a reader setting off on a long journey, who was afraid he might run out of reading matter while away."

Javier Marias on Giovanni Tomasi di Lampedusa (what a sexy name! - to be honest, it was the only reason I ever started reading Il Gattopardo); at the ThreePenny review.

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October 11, 2005

Slowness, Milan Kundera

(one of my favourite books ever)

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There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics, this takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

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The feeling of being elect is present, for instance, at every love relation. For love, is by definition, an unmerited gift: being loved without merit is the proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you are intelligent, you are decent, because you don't chase women, because you do the dishes then I'm disappointed. Such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer is to hear: I'm crazy about you even though you're not intelligent nor decent, even though you're a liar, an egotist, a bastard.

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...the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off both from the past and the future: he is wrenched from the continuity of time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy. In this state he is unaware of his age, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

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October 10, 2005

Short Anthology of Erotic Mirrors

The Chevalier stops, dazzled, at the door: the mirrors covering all the walls multiply their reflections in such a way that suddenly an endless procession of couples are embracing all around them. (Slowness, Kundera)

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Eugenie: (lies down) How comfortable I am in this haven! But why, my friends, have you put up all these mirrors?
Saint-Ange: There is a great sensual excitement in seeing lewdness multiplied around oneself in an infinite variety of positions. All parts of the body are exposed simultaneously, and perceiving the splendid combination of images adds enormously to one's pleasure. (Philosophy in the Bedroom, Marquis de Sade)

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He was in a bedroom with a canopied bed on a dais. There were furs on the floor and vaporous white curtains at the windows and mirrors, more mirrors. He was glad that he could bear these repetitions of himself, infinite reproductions of a handsome man, to whom the mystery of the situation had given a glow of expectation and alertness he had never known.
There were mirrors all around them, repeating the image of the woman lying there, her dress fallen off her breasts, her beautiful naked feet hanging over the bed, her legs slightly parted under her dress. (Delta of Venus, Anaïs Nin)

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Each home elicited a specific way of looking at it. In Éric's apartment the bed was the nerve center in a kaleidoscopic arrangement of camera lenses, screens and mirrors. (The sexual life of Catherine M., Catherine Millet)

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...she was seated on this chair, naked, and they kept her either from crossing her legs or bringing them together.
And since the wall in front of her was covered from floor to ceiling with a large mirror which was unbroken by any shelving, she could see herself, thus open, each time her gaze strayed to the mirror. (The story of O, Pauline Réage)

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I had such a good image to go with these excerpts...but this is a respectable blog after all ;-)

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October 04, 2005

Competition

Mr. Valéry did not like to compete.

Of any competition he would say that from the first to the last, any place was a bad place to finish.

And he would wonder:

- To win a competition from others or to lose a competition for others; what's the point!?
- I prefer to be vice-last or sub-last - he said, ironically.

And explained:

- A competition is fair only if all competitors start on equal conditions. But such a situation does not exist, it's a known fact. And if all were equal, how could one be better than the other? In a competition people finish as they started - concluded Mr. Valéry.

And Mr. Valéry added:

- I would like to see a 100 meters race where each track would finish in a different point.

- Imagine four 100 meters tracks like this ... (and he would draw)

-... in this way - continued Mr. Valéry - when finishing the competition, each athlete would better understand what was waiting for him on the following day. Even if he had won the race he would end it alone, which is a small life lesson.

And after this somewhat ambiguous statement, Mr. Valéry continued his daily stroll, with his slightly crooked body, the hat stuck in his head, and alone, completely alone, as always.

"O sr. Valéry", Caminho, 2002

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Gonçalo M. Tavares is one of my favourite Portuguese contemporary writers. Highly exportabe but I doubt it if he has been published abroad.

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Portuguese version down here.

O senhor Valéry não gostava de competir.
Sobre qualquer competição ele dizia que do 1º ao último lugar todas as classificações eram más.
E interrogava-se:

- Ganhar aos outros para quê? Perder com os outros por quê?
- Prefiro ser vice-último ou sub-último - dizia ele, com ironia.

E explicava:

- Só existe justiça numa competição se todos partirem de condições iguais. Mas tal não existe, já se sabe. E se todos fossem iguais como poderia ficar um à frente do outro? Numa competição as pessoas acabam como começam - concluía o sr. Valéry.

E o senhor Valéry dizia ainda:

- O que eu gostava era de ver uma corrida de 100 metros onde cada pista terminasse num ponto diferente.

- Imaginem 4 pistas de 100 metros assim... (e ele desenhava)

-...deste modo - continuava o sr. Valéry - ao terminar a competição, cada atleta perceberia melhor o que estava à sua espera no dia seguinte. Mesmo que ganhasse acabava a corrida sozinho, o que é uma pequena lição de vida.

E depois desta afirmação algo ambígua, o senhor Valéry prosseguiu o seu passeio diário, com o corpo um pouco curvado, o chapéu enterrado na cabeça, e sozinho, completamente sozinho, como sempre.

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September 15, 2005

City Lights

City Lights Bookstore is dangerous. I wasn't past the first set of shelves and already felt like buying all the books I'd seen :-)

"Founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, City Lights is one of the few truly great independent bookstores in the United States, a place where booklovers from across the country and around the world come to browse, read, and just soak in the ambiance of alternative culture's only "Literary Landmark."

I went there with Ricardo and he got me interested in Murakami, Sebald, Mexican Wrestling (he bought a great book filled with the kitschiest photos ever) and Osman Lins. It was the favourite authors exchange moment of the holidays :-)

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September 12, 2005

Altered Murakami

(an attempt to do something I first saw at this wonderful, wonderful project: Altered Books)

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September 08, 2005

Time Travel

"If there was anything that grabbed me about the book, it was the underlying conceit, the notion of time travel itself. Yet Wells had somehow managed to get that wrong too, I felt. He sends his hero into the future, but the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that most of us would prefer to visit the past(...). If given the chance of going forward or backward, I for one wouldn't have hesitated. I would much rather have found myself among the no-longer-living than the unborn. With so many historical enigmas to be solved, how not feel curious about what the world had looked like in, say, the Athens of Socrates or the Virginia of Thomas Jefferson?(...)To see your mother and father on the day they met, for example, or to talk to your grandparents when they were young children. Would anyone turn down that opportunity in exchange for a glimpse of an unknown and incomprehensible future?"
Paul Auster, Oracle Night

This bit affected me particularly. Thinking about it, if I could travel in time, I had no intention of visiting the future whatsoever but it didn't even cross my mind to visit my ancestors. I actually had a cunning plan :-) to change the course of History of the entire western civilization which I can't really post about (XXX-rated, I'm afraid).

I also asked some friends where/when would they travel to, out of statistical (and personal) curiosity. I'm posting a very non-representative sample of answers - since in its composition there are only highly intelligent beings of the opposite sex - but a high quality one :-)

I'm developing a theory that links the answer to the person's personality...

"The Holistic Bourgeois" said:

"I would go nowhere before the 20th century. I can't imagine myself not driving a car or not having paper to wipe my ass :-)
I'd go to the roaring 20's, USA. It must have been a great time socially, economically and culturally; also it should be a lot of fun mingling with artists and gangsters."

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"The Cautious Curious" said:

"Although there's the temptation to confirm some 'truths' that we think we know about the past, if given a chance to travel in time, I'd risk it and travel to the uncertain future (like 500 years from now), even if inside an indestructible device that would protect me in case I decide not to "land" there. The reason? This is the supreme curiosity, what's there for us on the following day, the only land of chances that we have. The Past, we slowly discover it through History and that itself is a Time Machine that has improved with the years. Discovering the future is much more complicated. Ah immortality, immortality..."

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"The Ambitious Inventor" said:

"Maybe back to the time of Leonardo Da Vinci or Isaac Newon - the time when great ideas / inventions / discoveries were being made. Today, revolutionary science is usually revolutionary to 10 super-experts in a corner, not the general public. Being the inventor of the parachute or discovering gravity - now that would be cool!"

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"The Lazy Laid-Back" said:

"Time Travel? What for? I like the Present. The Future is ours to build and the Past is of no interest to me. It's gone." - after which he makes me read out loud a passage from a book by Gonçalo M. Tavares about how there's no point in wanting to change the past since the connections between any two events are far too complex for us to understand. So destiny isn't really predetermined but we have no way to figure it out out either.
"Oh, wait. Maybe I would travel to the beginning of August 2005 so that I could go on holidays again."

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"The Hesitant Traveler" said:

"I'd like to meet Leonardo da Vinci because he was, probably, the most brilliant mind ever to have lived. I'd like to travel aboard the Niña with Columbus and the Espera with Cabral because, if it is great to travel, it must be unbelievable to travel on a (re)discovery expedition, and those were two of the greatest (re)discovery expeditions ever. But there were so many times and places to go, it's tough to choose... I just feel like traveling, so I went for the Discovery option... :-)))"

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"The Intensity Craver Cartographer" said:

"I'd like to travel back maybe 30,000 years into our past. What was the world really like then? Were we still cowering from beasts or starting to come into our own? During the Paleolithic, we were just starting to write on bones. The sky and stars and moon must have been like some strange fire lighting up the night sky. The howls of beasts a reminder that Death could come tomorrow and swiftly. That this very moment was a borrowed moment. The next day would bring on a new struggle, a new fight to survive. The depths of despair must have been deeper but the joys of the abbreviated life, I imagine, must have been euphoric."

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July 05, 2005

Moravagine

"I can understand your wanting to rest and get back to your books. Of course you need to think things over, you always needed time to think about a whole pile of things, to look, to see, to compare and record, to take notes on the thousand things you haven't had the chance to classify with your own mind. But why don't you leave that to the police archives? Haven't you got it through your mind that human thought is a thing of the past and that philosophy is worse than Bertillon's guide to harassed cops? You make me laugh with your metaphysical anguish, it’s just that you’re scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral and animal, all disorder, and so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought, history, wars, inventions, business and the arts, and all theories, passions and systems. It’s always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out of it? And what will you make? What are you looking for? There’s no truth. There’s only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction. Life." - Blaise Cendrars, Moravagine

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May 22, 2005

Rereading

"When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before" - Cliff Fadiman

Note to self: Ana Karenina.

A rereading list:
The razor's edge - Somerset Maugham

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May 17, 2005

Reading bliss

Buying and reading books about books is a very serious compulsive mania from which I suffer. Fortunately, this last time I found a little gem called "The library" by Zoran Zivkovic, a fantastic set of short stories which are in fact a bibliophile's delight:

"A cycle of six thematically linked stories, droll renditions of the nightmares ensuing upon misplaced, or (of course) excessive, bibliophilia. A writer encounters a website where all his possible future books are on display; a lonely man faces an infinite flow of hardback books through his mailbox; an ordinary library turns by night into an archive of souls; the Devil sets about raising standards of infernal literacy; one book houses all books; a connoisseur of hardcovers strives to expel a lone paperback from his collection."

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April 28, 2005

Through the Looking-Glass

"One CAN'T believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!" Lewis Carroll

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