The Joy of Books

Nikamowin

Kevin Lee Burton is a member of the Swamp Cree tribe from God's Lake Narrows in Manitoba, Canada who grew up speaking his ancestral language. Moving to Toronto was a disorienting experience and he would often repeat Cree words to himself so that he did not forget them. Nikamowin, Cree for "song," is a beatbox-style exploration of the connections between land and language.

Also recommended is Helen Haig-Brown's ?E?Anx/The Cave, about a man who comes across a cave that turns out to be a portal to the Tsilhqot'in spirit world. The Cave was made for an international collaboration of indigenous peoples, in which each was assigned a genre outside their usual repertoire. Haig-Brown was given science fiction, an area often noted for its emphasis on exploration, expansion, and the conquest of alien planets. Not wishing to reuse colonialist tropes from the majority culture, Haig-Brown turned inward to depict a world within our own. Unfortunately, I could not find this one online, but do check it out if you ever get the chance.

Misery Bear Goes to Work

He wasn't too happy on his day off either, though. Poor guy needs some counseling.

Via Monday Through Friday

God of War Style PB&J

It occurs to me that This Book and I Could Be Friends has been a sad place lately, what with the Great Fire of London, that Top 10 Villains list, that omgkillyourself war book, and the upcoming selection for the Unstructured Group Read, which is about a delusional gulag survivor. So I feel like I need to lighten up the mood around here. I saw this little clip (a parody of this video game) at a party recently and it was a huge hit so I decided to share.

I can't figure out if this guy is really awesome or a total loser.

Breathing Water

Just some Halloween season creepiness I found. This is "Breathing Water" by Inhale. I'm not quite sure how to classify this - was going to say ambient/electronica but then read that they're considered metal. . . WTF? Anyway, I discovered this "song" in the "Music" section of TV Tropes's High Octane Nightmare Fuel page, which had this to say:

It's an eight-minute-long track that isn't so much a song as a nightmare being quietly related over creepy ambient sound. The "singer's" voice is mechanically slurred into the Uncanny Valley, so the emotion seems detached and disjointed, and it's hard to even tell its gender at parts. It details slow death by drowning, but with parts so surreal as to truly ring true as a nightmare, like there being presents floating everywhere, and the singer trying to hold onto them to keep from sinking. The beginning and the end are slow fades in/out to the sound of buoys clanging rhythmically...heard from underwater.

Don't say I didn't warn ya.

Jane Austen's Fight Club

This needs to be a real movie. (via Feministe, which also has a transcript)

And also: a funny and thought-provoking post on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as a form of cultural appropriation. The author argues that works considered feminine, such as the novels of Jane Austen, are often devalued in our society and Seth Grahame-Smith's addition of zombies amounts to a "masculinization" of Pride and Prejudice that therefore "improves" it. She gives some amusing suggestions for the "feminization" of books highly regarded by men, such as A Hitchhiker’s Guide to That Tiny Sliver of the Earth the Idiots from Sex and the City Inhabit. There's even more funniness in the comments: Nuclear Hamlet and The Sound and the Fury and the Swarm of Killer Bees.

SQUEEEEEEEEEE!

Via Life With Dogs

Scintillation

By Xavier Chassaing (via 500galaxies)

Ever Wonder What English Sounds Like?

This video finally answers the question. (via HowStuffWorks)

Prisencolinensinainciusol, which was released internationally as a single – see Billboard – imitates very accurately the sound of the Afro-American influenced English of US pop songs of the era. Despite the weirdness, it’s being acclaimed as proto-rap, having come out several years before rap as a genre became formally known with the 1979 release of the Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight (itself the phonetic origin of the refrain of the Ketchup Song.

Weirdly Cute

Just found this odd little video on Welcome to Planet Chen. Such an interesting blog. I'm always finding new things there - she introduced me to Fever Ray.

The Call of Ktulu

Between this song and "One" (inspired by Johnny Got His Gun) Metallica is surprisingly literary. (There's actually a ton of cool Lovecraft stuff on YouTube.)

Menard Stands Alone

Borges and I have never agreed with each other. Same with Kafka. The puzzling thing is that I've loved other authors who either influenced them or were influenced by them (such as Macedonio Fernández, Georges Perec, and Ferenc Karinthy), and I came into Kafka and Borges wholly expecting to love them. I studied both in college too, but that still didn't help. (Actually, the best insight into Kafka I've ever gotten was from an anthology about the Iron Curtain called The Wall in My Head.) So when I heard that our Non-Structured Book Club was going to be doing an extracurricular Borges reading, I initially opted out and chose to simply read everyone's posts instead. But then I found myself intrigued by what was being said about "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," so I decided, why not? Maybe I should give Mr. Borges another chance.

"Menard" is written in the form of an article from an academic journal. The author/narrator was a friend of the late Pierre Menard, a French literary critic, and is utterly infatuated with what he perceives to be Menard's brilliant project involving Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. Menard wanted to write it himself. Not copy it. He wanted to somehow channel Cervantes and compose the Quixote word for word. As Menard explained it:

When I was ten or twelve years old, I read it, perhaps in its entirety. Later, I have reread it closely certain chapters, those which I shall not attempt for the time being. I have also gone through all the interludes, the plays, the Galatea, the exemplary novels, the undoubtedly laborious tribulations of Persiles and Segismunda and the Viaje del Parnaso . . . My general recollection of the Quixote, simplified by forgetfulness and indifference, can well equal the imprecise and prior image of a book not yet written. Once that image (which no one can legitimately deny me) is postulated, it is certain that my problem is a good bit more difficult that Cervantes' was. My obliging predecessor did not refuse the collaboration of change: he composed his immortal work somewhat à la diable, carried along by the inertias of language and invention. I have taken on the mysterious duty of reconstructing literally his spontaneous work.

Menard rejects the idea of literally becoming Cervantes by forgetting all the history of Europe since 1602, fighting the Turks as Cervantes did, and so forth on the grounds that such a thing would be impossible. Of course, he acknowledges that the whole undertaking is impossible, but of all the ways of going about it, that would be the least interesting.

Borges's imaginary academic nevertheless believes that Menard's endeavor was quite successful, even perceiving his friend's signature style in certain passages of the Quixote which are completely identical to those of Cervantes. He claims to recognize the influence of Shakespeare and further praises Menard's mastery of a foreign language and alien dialect (Renaissance Spanish) compared to Cervantes's advantage of writing in his own native tongue. Why, it's astounding, he goes on, that Menard was able to ignore the work of William James and, like Cervantes, proclaim history to be the origin of reality instead of an inquiry into reality! In short, the narrator is arguing that Menard's word-for-word duplicate of the Quixote is richer, deeper, and a grander achievement than Cervantes's original.

As Emily notes in her post, Borges brings up a multitude of questions surrounding context, subjectivity, and perspective. Although the two texts are identical, the copy is held to be superior because its reader (the author of the article) was able to locate more meaning in it. In other words, he examined the copy as an artifact of the environment in which it was produced: the early twentieth century, presumably in France, as opposed to Spain in the late 1500s. Since the narrator views this Quixote as having arisen entirely in the mind of Menard, it's like a copy without an original.

It was then that the heavens opened, a light shined down, and Borges started to make sense.

I'm a big fan of Ghost in the Shell, a (post)cyberpunk Japanese franchise that began with the Ghost in the Shell manga by Masamune Shirow and has since expanded to include two manga sequels, three acclaimed anime films, and a popular anime television series. Like The Matrix, which it greatly influenced, GitS is deeply concerned with postmodern philosophy and social theory. The title of the TV show, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, refers to a concept developed over the first season. The "stand alone complex" is basically a "phenomenon where unrelated, yet very similar actions of individuals create a seemingly concerted effort." For example, say a building catches fire and burns down. While accidents like that happen all the time, depending on the greater context of the time and place in which said building was located, people can get it into their heads that the fire was the work of an arsonist motivated by whatever political or religious ideology is currently making news (i.e. Islamic terrorism). Several malcontents then get on the imaginary bandwagon and commit their own acts of arson in the name of Allah. A chain of spontaneous order is then created out of the chaos of society, politics, media, and random accidents. But the copycats have no original.

And then I realized I was doing the exact same thing as Borges's fictional academic! I was anachronistically analyzing an older text ("Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote" by Jorge Luis Borges) from the perspective of someone familiar with literary and philosophical ideas that would not be developed until decades after said text was written. "To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce, is this not a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?" Menard's disciple asks. (I like Emily's translation better: ". . . a sufficient renewal of those faded spiritual warnings?") Just as Cervantes's position regarding the power of letters v. arms could not possibly have been influenced by Nietzsche (as Menard's completely identical passage is claimed to have been), Borges could not possibly have written "Pierre Menard" with any knowledge of Japanese cyberpunk anime.

And thus: the meaning of a text is ultimately subjective, as the reader's response always occurs within the context of the reader's knowledge and experience, which may be completely and utterly different, especially given the passage of time, from those of the author.

I get it! I like Borges now!

My Borges edition, incidentally, has an introduction by William Gibson, whose Neuromancer trilogy is widely regarded as the origin of the cyberpunk genre. I knew I was onto something.



It's the audio from the Matrix: Reloaded trailer with images from GitS: SAC, starring Togusa as Neo, Motoko Kusanagi as Trinity, and Daisuke Aramaki as Morpheus.

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The Non-Structured Book Club is reading three short pieces by Borges for the month of May. Our schedule is as follows:

May 7: "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"
May 14: "The Library of Babel"
May 21: "The South"

This week's participants were:

Claire
Emily
Nicole
Richard
Rise
Sarah

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Rifftrax Does Twilight!

I laughed so hard.

Click here to watch Buffy slay Edward.

Glorious Fun

"We might not make it. We might annihilate ourselves before that vision can ever be realized. And that would be just the most incredible waste. We're at a crossroads, and I hope we're able to take the right one. As the poet said: 'Of all the sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these. "It might have been."'"



As I struggle with this review I have due on April 1 for The Front Table, it is good to know that there are short, happy books one can turn to when the mental effort demanded by Literature threatens to induce total brain freeze. Star Trek novels are a wonderful example of this. Especially those by Peter David, which are not only fun but still contain substance.

I, Q is a very special book. It is a collaborative effort between Peter David and John de Lancie, who has played Q on The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. The arrogant, annoying, and all-powerful Q is easily Star Trek's most popular recurring character. A member of the Q Continuum, a race of omniscient god-like beings, Q is infamous for disrupting lives and civilizations with his questionable sense of humor and dangerously playful personality. Even the other Q can't stand him.

Unfortunately, God, or whatever Supreme Being created the multiverse, has decided that she is tired of watching the same old play on different stages with different characters. History in countless different universes does nothing but endlessly repeat itself. The Q Continuum is slunk in the same ennui. When you know everything and can do anything, really then, what's the point? In fact, a Q who wanted to kill himself for precisely this reason was the subject of the deeply philosophical Voyager episode "Death Wish."

Now a giant black hole has appeared that's sucking in all of reality! Including Q's wife and son!

Well, Q certainly is not going to stand by and let this happen! With the help of Captain Picard and Data, Q must travel through one bizarre realm after another, encountering old friends and foes alike, in a metaphysical quest to locate his missing family and find some way to stop everything from literally going down the drain. Along the way, he will question the nature of divinity, omnipotence, and reality's innate unreality. Given the vast scope of the book's subject material, I was expecting something longer and more epic (like Peter David's absolutely excellent Vendetta and Q-Squared), but it's just a Star Trek novel so I'm not going to quibble.

It was simply a good, entertaining read.



Share Einstein On The Beach (For An Eggman) by Counting Crows

The Whole World's a Stage, Part Deux

Yesterday, Sunday, February 28th, was the third meeting of Padfoot and Prongs's Good Books Club. Padfoot and I were joined by Lula O. and Janefan for a discussion of Thomas Stoppard's 1968 play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, which tells the tragic tale of its bumbling title characters. Minor comic relief in Shakespeare's Hamlet who met a fatal end, Ros & Guil now take center stage in their very own quest to make sense of the grand events that seem to be sweeping them along. Not only have they been assigned to find out what's eating the Prince of Denmark, they also have to deal with that troop of actors whose play mirrors the plot of Hamlet. What could it all mean???

Padfoot and Lula were convinced that Ros & Guil were already dead from the start. (Their interpretation of two characters, I noted, was akin to the role of the Fisher King in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land.") It wasn't just the title, Padfoot and Lula argued, but the odd vibes they got from the opening scene, with Ros & Guil's ruminations on probability and divine intervention and the impression that they had been playing coin toss - and landing on heads every single time - practically forever. I still wasn't convinced. I countered that the play was leading up to their deaths, in accordance with the overarching themes of art, life, order, and absurdity. "There's a design at work in all art - surely you know that?," says the Player. "Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion." The point of the plot, I felt, was that Ros & Guil were trying to understand a series of causes and determine what the effect of would be on them (death).

We arrived at a compromise: that Ros & Guil were in a limbo of sorts. Neither alive or dead. You got the feeling that the drawing of the curtains did not mean the end - that Ros & Guil were doomed to start the whole thing over again until they finally figured shit out. But they are, after all, characters in a play. So it's basically a metatheatrical casualty loop that Lula compared to "one of those Star Trek episodes." A play within a play within a play, with an invisible scriptwriter somewhere, or, more accurately, a variation of Voltaire's "cosmic clockmaker" who got the whole thing rolling and then walked away. "Wheels have been set in motion," Guil, the more sensible of the two, observes, "and they have their own pace, to which we are . . . condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order."He then recalls a Chinese philosopher who had dreamed he was a butterfly and spent the rest of his life wondering if he was a butterfly dreaming that he was a philosopher. You have to envy his certainty, Guil concluded.

Meanwhile, Padfoot was properly horrified that I had seen neither the Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead movie nor The Princess Bride! I promised to rectify the situation as soon as possible. Although I can't quite bring myself to be all that enthusiastic about a kid's fantasy story, I really must see the film version of this, which was directed by none other than Thomas Stoppard himself. Plays really are meant to be seen, not read, and having already seen Hamlet onstage, I look forward to the translation of Stoppard's words into acting.

Up next: Brave New World, yet another twentieth century Shakespeare reference!

Previous Selections:
Mother Night
Something Wicked This Way Comes

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The rest of the group was quite silly over Gary Oldman, who played Sirius Black in the Harry Potter films. So while we're on the subject of Shakespeare and sci-fi/fantasy actors, I give you Ian McDiarmid in the BBC's 1979 production of Macbeth, also starring Ian McKlellen (Gandalf in the LOTR films) in the title role.



Can you believe that cute little redhead became Emperor Palpatine???

Of Love, Life, and Death

The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel)

By Macedonio Fernández

Translated by Margaret Schwartz

Open Letter Press

238 Pages
February 23, 2010




Humans, breathers, those innumerable incessantly stirring the world's air, relentlessly ordering it into your chests, elevating your eternally open mouths to an eternal heaven, beings of the heartbeat and the voice that either brightens or breaks, which perhaps every day demands alternately an end or an eternity, there's beauty to give us all understanding of the Mystery, and to stop all pain. But where is it? Is it in Art, in Conduct, in Understanding, in Passion? In Cervantes, or Beethoven, or Wagner, or in some great delirium: in adoring intonation, dazzled by Walt Whitman's Man?

Argentinian author Macedonio Fernández (1874-1952), though largely unknown in the English-speaking world, has been something of a cult figure to several well-known Latin American authors of the twentieth century, including his protege, Jorge Luis Borges. Fernández's adult life began in conventional bourgeoisie comfort until the death of his wife in 1920, following which he abandoned his profession as a lawyer, sent his children to live with various relatives, and drifted through a series of boarding houses. Translator Margaret Schwartz likens his place in literary mythology to the role of Socrates: as the founder of a new, uniquely Argentinian way of looking at eternal things who dramatically influenced ensuing generations, his voice and teachings revealed through the writings of his students. Fernández was also noted for his eccentricities, such as the time he gave away his guitar to a random stranger in the street, and the other time he tried to establish an anarchist colony in Paraguay only to give up after one night of mosquitoes.

The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel) was commenced in 1925, went through five drafts, and remained in an unedited, unfinalized state at the time of Fernández's death (similar to another great product of Latin American literature, Roberto Bolaño's 2666). Like his contemporary Louis Aragon, as well as many other writers of the Modernist era, Fernández sought to reinvent the rules of the novel, starting with a very basic premise: Why risk love when death is inevitable? In tackling a question that has haunted countless thinkers before him, Fernández takes a deeply metaphysical approach that influences the very form of his greatest work. Dedicated to the caprices of the "Skip-Around Reader," whom Fernández claims will unwittingly find themself reading in order, The Museum of Eterna's Novel is a work of philosophical metafiction that uses its medium to explore the cosmic complexities of human life and human love.

Fernández was of the opinion that Art should not imitate Life. "I want the reader to always know he is reading a novel and not watching the living, not attending to a 'life.' The moment the reader falls into Hallucination, that ignominy of Art, I have lost rather than gained a reader." In fact, the bulk of The Museum of Eterna's Novel is not a novel at all, but a series of prologues, some fifty in total, with titles such as "Prologue That Thinks it Knows Something, Not About the Novel (It's Not Allowed That), But About the Doctrine of Art," "The Essential Fantasmagoricalism of the World," "The Man Who Feigned to Live" (which is one big footnote), and "For Readers Who Will Perish if They Don't Know What the Novel is About." Some meditate on the process of creating The Museum of Eterna's Novel from the perspective of both the author and the characters, including the cook who decided to resign and left the remaining characters with nothing to eat. Other prologues, in dense and difficult but ultimately rewarding prose, set up the mystical underpinnings of the main story.

The actual novel takes place on an estancia called "La Novela," owned by the President, who has gathered together his closest friends, including Maybegenius, Sweetheart, The Lover, Simple, the Gentleman Who Does Not Exist, and Eterna, who is both the President's love interest and the personification of idealized beauty and eternal love. There, the characters exist in the moment and only for each other, spending each day in one another's company and speculating on the nature of companionship and eternity. And here we come to the crux of the matter: the definition of "Totalove," the theme connecting all the musings and mind exercises of both prologues and novel. Fernández describes it as "the Highest form of Daydream." It is a rapturous state of passion that prevails only in the present and is the ultimate form of love: for a beloved, for friendship, or for art and beauty. The problem then becomes how to sustain a moment that is only that: a moment. The Action is only one aspect of Totalove. There is also the anticipation, like the weeks building up towards Christmas and the sadness one feels after the presents have been opened and the rest of the day still remains. Once the Action has occurred, there is nothing left but loss or even death.

Hence the prologues: The Museum of Eterna's Novel is a novel that doesn't want to begin because in our beginning is our end.

The Action initiated by the President is the conquest of Buenos Aires by beauty, which is achieved by eliminating all references to history and the past, including statues of famous men and all homages to the memory of heroic deeds. Streets are given new names such as Peace, Hope, Happiness, The Bride, and Youth. "In the end, something happened to non-flowing time, like history, and there was only a fluid Present, whose only memory was of what returns to being daily, and not what simply repeats, like birthdays. That's why the city almanac has 365 days with only one name: 'Today,' and the city's main street is also named 'Today.'" But the Action fails to bring fulfillment to the President and his relationship with Eterna. He is unable to achieve Totalove and the result is a gradual break-up of La Novela and the final good-bye between all the characters. I realize you may want me to continue on, Fernández assures the reader, and force me to bring good tidings to all these characters you have fallen in love with, but Posterity likes tragedy and not comedy, and thus, we too must reluctantly take leave.

Clearly, Macedonio Fernández was a fascinating, complicated man. That is evident from this book alone, and not to mention his biography. The Museum of Eterna's Novel is a brilliant, thoughtful and frequently hilarious work that brings to mind everything from Mark Twain's irreverent humor to Jorge Luis Borges's mental labyrinths to Edgar Allen Poe's preoccupation with death and idealized beauty. It's definitely slow reading - Fernández's prose is often deliberately obtuse. Translator Schwartz describes it as "baroque" and likens it to Fernández's presentation of himself as a relic of the colorful past bumbling his way through sleek, fast modernity. But what struck me about The Museum of Eterna's Novel was how little it fit the image I had developed of Latin American literature, which I had classified as writers such as Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Roberto Bolaño (despite all their political and artistic disagreements with one another). The Museum of Eterna's Novel felt more like a work of a European avant-gardist, written in a cafe in Paris while hanging out with the Surrealists or the American expatriates. In fact, it fits into no box I can think of. I'll warn you: it's a difficult read and this review took me forever because I just couldn't figure out how to describe it. But if you're up to the challenge, this book is truly worth it.



Review Copy

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For some reason, this video just seems to fit. I think it makes more sense if you read the book.

Music: "Silence," Delerium feat. Sarah McLachlan, Karma
Images: Final Fantasy VIII

Star Trek v. Star Wars (And the Case of the Missing Book)

I was almost done with Quim Monzó's Gasoline, an ARC from Open Letter Press, when the dang book vanished! So until I find it, finish it, and review it, here is a fun video to hold you over.

Holy Christ, it's got 21,586 of the geekiest comments ever!

*sigh* I suppose this is the closest we'll ever come to seeing Patrick Stewart and Ian McDiarmid onscreen or onstage together.

Latawnya the Naughty Horse Learns to Say "No" to Drugs

I found this on the Awful Library Books blog. This is quite possibly their greatest post ever, along with Don't Make Me Go Back Mommy: A Child's Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse.

And here is Latawnya's very own Wikipedia entry!

For Maximum Creepy, Just Add Coyotes

I just finished reading Susan Hill's The Woman in Black for the Slaves of Golconda, where I've just become a contributor. I'll be writing of post for Slaves within the next few days but for now I'd just like to comment on Hill's use of atmosphere. The Woman in Black is centered on a bleak old house in the wild, desolate English swamps. Ruins of an ancient monastery and crumbling graveyard are also located on the property. It's so reminiscent of "The Fall of the House of Usher" that I literally expected the house to, well, fall. But one thing that struck me as I was reading this book was the eerie sounds the protagonist often heard at night, alone in an isolated house alleged to be haunted. A child's scream, a disembodied whistle, the clip-clop of a ghostly horse.

Last night, while in laying in bed by an open window, I was awakened by a chorus of mad pipers. Crazed howlings spiraled out from the dark woods, winding higher and higher and reaching a piercing, fevered pitch.

I love coyotes, but they can be so creepy!

Wolves are such a cliché in fantasy and mythology. (So are felines, to a lesser extent, particularly lions.) Many have waxed poetic about the primal cry of the wolf, and werewolves are second only to vampires and zombies as pop culture's monster of choice. But what about coyotes? I know Patricia Briggs has an urban fantasy series about a werecoyote, but other than that, coyotes are so underrepresented! It really makes no sense - wolves are borderline endangered, whereas coyotes are found everywhere imaginable, from cities (Chicago has a large population) to suburbs to snowy mountains to the tropics. Millions from Alaska down to Central America are familiar with their yips, yaps, and howls and their haunting resonance through the night. So why, I wonder, are they so absent from fiction? They have so much potential!

Think of how much scarier The Woman in Black, or "The Fall of the House of Usher" or any other horror classic would be with coyote noises!

(This coyote is supposed to be expressing happiness but doesn't he just sound like he's in pain?)

I Had to Share This

A North Korean propaganda cartoon with snarky English subtitles.

And also: David Hasselhoff.