10 December 09
Troperville
We’re now well into the off-season, and one of these days we will need to break out the baseball movies to make it through the winter without ballgames to entertain us. Maybe we’ll even watch some we haven’t seen before. Of course the tropes of these movies will be familiar: sports movies seem to center around the same half-dozen tropes: the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits (Major League), the player on an end-of-career Redemption Quest (For Love of the Game), the Miracle Rally (Major League again)…
The above links are all from a wonderful site that took me only six years to run across, the by-now-quite-misnamed TV Tropes. This is a wiki whose participants have been cataloging all the tropes of creative storytelling they can identify: not just in TV, but in film, literature, poetry, anime, games, theatre, and real life. Completely fascinating. Even A Spot of Tea hasn’t escaped their attention.
12 May 09
Rhétorique Française
I am very happy to be back in touch with an old friend and wonderful translator from my Harvard Press days, Art Goldhammer, and even more so to learn that he has a blog, French Politics. It’s a great way to follow gallic happenings, which I admit I haven’t been, much. (I really wish there were a counterpart for Spain, and if anyone knows of one, in Spanish or English, please let me know.)
Today there’s a link to an article by Jean Daniel of the Nouvel Observateur on his recent luncheon meeting with Nicolas Sarkozy. This is quality, elegant writing, and reveals, as Art points out, a nuanced series of layers in the French President which I found surprising. (Why? I mean, nobody can argue he’s not a clever bastard.)
Nuanced he may be, but Sarkozy doesn’t seem to tire of the sound of his own voice, and the quote in the article I thought most telling about his character, about his vision of his place in history, and which he apparently uses to justify his “maverick” independence, is this one: « Les grandes choses, on les décide seul car le consensus interdit l’audace. Reste que les grandes réformes, comme la décolonisation ou l‘élection au suffrage universel, sont nécessairement impopulaires au départ puis qu’elles modifient le cours des choses. » (The really big things, you decide on alone because consensus precludes audacity. So the great reforms, such as decolonisation or universal suffrage, are necessarily unpopular at first, because they change the course of things. Sorry if my translation’s not as good as Art’s would be, but you get the idea.)
This sort of quote would in years past have found its way into British A-level, Oxbridge entrance, or university examination papers, with the simple addition of the word “Discuss.” We’d have been expected to provide copious (but not too many!) historical examples along with memorized quotes for bonus points and provided a series of pros and cons, plonking down in the end on one side or the other, trying all the while not to make it look too pedestrian. Our French counterparts, though, would have been expected to provide, in addition to such arguments, an elegance of phrasing and structure.
I bet Sarko aced these kinds of exam questions.
26 February 09
Delighting in a New Vowel
Hanging around the hispanohablantes on Ravelry has introduced me to the gender-unspecific vowel that is apparently now being widely used in Spanish texting: @.
Spanish, like many Romance languages, has an obligatory masculine/feminine divide in nouns. Sometimes the endings are unintuitive (la mano [the hand], el drama [drama]) but mostly “a” is feminine, “o” is masculine. This being a culture where historically the masculine incorporated everyone, in the 60s if you said “hola a todos” it was assumed you meant hello world, or hello everyone, masculine feminine and neuter.
I’m delighted to see new spanish-speaking knitters chime in on Ravelry with the “hola a tod@s,” the ‘o’ encompassing the ‘a’ as a perfect, ambi vowel. It’s particularly heartening because in fact not all spanish-speaking knitters are female, nor are all of them straight, and I love the inclusiveness that’s implied…
2 November 08
Cooking, Carpentry, and Sewing
That’s how one of my classmates described the activities in the Bookbinding III class I took this weekend at the San Francisco Center for the Book. This time we only produced one book, but this was a large and complicated one, with 20 signatures, sewn endbands, and a split-board binding. The cooking bit was learning how to make wheat paste glue, for the carpentry we had to do lots of precise cuts with the board shear and guillotine, and the sewing of course was the signatures and the endbands, the latter being very finicky and difficult. I’ve now completed the introductory bookbinding series at SFCB so it’s time to start applying these skills. It would be nice to produce something other than blank books, so my next project might be to typeset some text from Project Gutenberg, print it up on a laser printer, and bind it as my very own book design. Imposition problems here we come.
22 September 08
Bookbinding
We’re starting to accumulate a small pile of books we’ve bound. I am quite enjoying the paper in the “Ideal Sketchbook” — Kelly Classic — for pen and ink. I think this may become my main bird sketchbook.
Numenius has been dazzling me with his new binding skills. Headbands and everything. I have no idea where this is leading but we’re both enjoying it. It’s companionable and that’s unusual for what is often a solitary activity.
Our trip to Art Ellis in Sacramento and lunch at Tapa the World (they catered Chris and Karen’s wedding — we were impressed then; we were impressed again on Saturday) yielded the following conversation at the next table:
“Mauritania. Sand. Lots of sand.”
“Do you get robbed there?”
“No, I got mugged in Rio. Machete.”
“I know a guy who got mugged in Rio by machete.”
“Really? Who?”
“Christian.”
“Christian left Rio a few hours before I got mugged on the beach by machete.”
“You’re kidding! You mean he took your story?”
19 September 08
Left Unsaid
Before my mother moved back east a couple of summers ago, she handed me bags and bags of things she wasn’t taking with her but didn’t want to throw away. These included improbable numbers of bottles of moisturizing lotion; they also included all my letters home — since I first went to boarding school in 1973.
I know they must have made us write home weekly, but I was still shocked by the sheer number of them, and by their mostly uniform vacuousness, which continued on into university and beyond. They’re painful to read and mostly I haven’t. But they lurk…
I finished Geraldine Brooks’s March last night, a novel that starts out with the Little Women father writing home. It has been a horrific day, a day in which he, a green army chaplain, has tried (and failed) to save a wounded man from drowning as they retreated in terror from a confederate counterattack. He is wracked with pain and cold and shame and fear and guilt yet none of this makes it onto the page: he writes about the cooking fires around him and the beauty of the sky. The truth of that day — and many other terrible truths about many other days, truths that likewise never made it onto the pages that are sent with love and remorse about the deception — the truth of that day finally emerges as Marmee visits her “very ill” husband in hospital and tries to save him from his demons. She is transformed in this novel from a milquetoast goody-two-shoes into a raging spitfire with a terrible temper (and how we love it: tell it like it is, Marmee), and she feels anger and betrayal at the lies that have been flung her way. Yet when she tries to write home to her daughters, she is faced with the same dilemma: tell the truth and cause pain and anguish, or spare them from it and lie. And then live with the consequences of your lies.
Choices, these are. At the time, it doesn’t seem so momentous. “I’ve started smoking” is a truth I felt able to divulge in a letter home, difficult though it was, leading to a reminder my grandfather had died of emphysema; “I lost my virginity in the darkroom on Saturday” is one I left out. It reveals to me, again, how difficult parenting must be: choosing between honesty and wanting to protect your young. Of course my own omissions can be explained in terms of teenage rebellion, but looking through these letters, there’s more.
If I had been encouraged, or decided on my own, to share with my parents the struggles I was facing — wanting to fit in, wanting to be “cool,” feeling the pressure (of course this would have involved acknowledging it, which was far from the reality) — it may have been possible to write the letters with the integrity that, in hindsight, I wish I’d had. And it’s possible I might have made different choices, guided by parental wisdom and love and, perhaps, honesty.
My grandfather — the one who died of emphysema — was a man for whom lying was close to a crime; it was certainly a sin. He raised my mother and uncle to share this view. Yet, looking through his own letters home during World War I, I see the same reticence to reveal the truth in letters in as Mr. March’s. “I’ve had the grippe but some poor fellows have it much worse” is the only mention I’ve found in any correspondence anywhere from family members that touches on the great flu pandemic of 1918. It is left to my imagination to fathom what he was really seeing, because in tents in western France with thousands of soldiers, many of them ill and dying, it can’t have been something you’d want to see, ever.
Much has been written on the impossibility of language to convey some things so horrific most of us would rather they remain unsaid. This is the project of many films about the holocaust: say the unsayable, because it is the truth, speak it even though you don’t find the words. Truth becomes a driving imperative. We recognize it when we see it — if we’re lucky.
At a time when most of us expect lies of all our leaders, even those at the highest level, when outright untruth or misremembering or failure to remember or I’ll take the fifth or other permutations of culturally sanctioned lying from the top down, lying that has led to, for example, people still dying in Iraq — now is the time to take baby steps to learn how to tell the truth again. It can start with the innocuous things. I didn’t, in fact, make my bed this morning. I got a less than stellar performance review. I made some stupid mistakes in the stock market. We can then progress to “I did have sex with that woman” and “we knew all along there were no weapons of mass destruction.” From there, perhaps, when there are real consequences inherent in the truth we tell, we might make wiser decisions in the first place…
15 September 08
Three Novels That Touch on, or Skirt, War
My sister sent me, as a birthday present, a new novel by Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book. I had read Year of Wonders a while ago and loved her heroine who survives the plague and loss of her family and everyone she knew to end up in a place of unlikely redemption. My sister D. thought I’d like this new one because bookbinding and calligraphy and Spanish history are all part of the plot. She was right; the sequences of the book’s violent journey through history and Europe bracket each other like a book of hours, plus there’s a great gutsy Aussie heroine.
Some Spanish friends recently gave me a copy of Los Soldados de Salamina by Javier Cercas, which apparently was a bestseller in Spain in 2001 but which I’d never heard of. It recreates the story of a falangist (Spanish fascist) writer who faces, but improbably survives, a firing squad at the end of the Spanish Civil War and whose story is recreated by a journalist with writer’s block — the metaphors are as unsubtle as the people whose story is told — and to whom not all the facts are available. (Think Rashomon under Franco.) It was fun to read a novel in Spanish again, something I should try more often; if I read El Pais on Fridays I can start to make a list of thing that look interesting to me.
Finally, well back into the Brooks mode, I’m reading March, which is a fictional retelling of the absent father from Alcott’s Little Women, and which draws heavily on Bronson Alcott’s diaries and correspondence. This book is not about the American Civil War but the war is the backdrop.
Trying not to be too violent in my reading, here, but maybe there’s a lesson in all this…
15 August 08
Printer's Companion
Diego is not the first cat to develop an interest in the printing arts. The special collections librarian Donald Kerr at the University of Otago discovered on page 250 of the library’s copy of Astesanus de Asts Summa de casibus conscientiae, an extremely rare work from 1472 or 1473 printed in Strassburg by Johann Mentelin, three cat paw prints in ink.
Kerr noted that Mentelin had been described as “a careless printer”, so perhaps this was a good example. He checked with several other libraries holding copies of the work to see if there were any other cat paw prints to be found, but no such luck. The librarian at the State Library of Berlin noted however on their copy that there was bad damage on the initial and final leaves from rodent nibblings, which could explain why Mentelin kept a cat around the print house.
(From PhiloBiblos.)
21 June 08
You Say Aluminium...
One of the hardest things I find to say, even though I’ve lived here for nearly 20 years, is “alOOminum.” Skedule and prohject don’t seem to pose the same problems, but aloominum’s just something I can’t get to come out of my mouth (a bit like stOOpid unless I’m being arch or or FRITillary unless I’m trying to illustrate how it’s possible to merge four syllables into one). I got chastised again the other day for saying aluminium “wrong” and retorted that we (we in this case meaning Brits, though this like so much else in my identity shifts according to the winds, the wicket or diamond, or the company) had the word first, so how could it be wrong?
But since I’m given to sounding authoritative without the slightest reason to, and having resolved to have more reason to, I decided to look it up.
Seems like there’s no clear cut answer either way, which doesn’t resolve anything but is certainly interesting. In fact it could form the basis for a sociolinguist’s PhD (or at least a paper). Pronunciation of scientific elements: hypercorrection for the latinate, or hypercorrection against it?
5 June 08
Vetinari Ascendant
We’ve reported on how Barack Obama bears more than a passing resemblance to Lord Vetinari. This scene in the Senate today could have easily been written by Terry Pratchett, especially the bit about smiling up at the press at the end.