ry--"
"Well, your mother," riposted the readily nettled youth, "is so ugly--"
"Gentlemen," implored Randolph [...]
~ p. 306: Merle's idea of Iceland spar's potential is similar to Tesla's ideas for electricity. In this reading, "anarchy" simply means offering something that would make life easier for all--except the Powers That Be.
~ p. 312: "If she was not to be the great lost love of his life, she could've perhaps been the great unlistened-to commentator upon it."
~ p. 323: The true Anarchists revealed as Vibe's bombers.
~ p. 324: Kit's new direction:
"Dr. Hilbert at Göttingen is developing his 'Spectral Theory,' which requires a vector space of infinite dimensions. His co-adjutor Minkowski thinks that dimensions will eventually all just fade away into a Kontinuum of space and time."~ p. 354-55: Magician Luca Zombini:
."His trade also involves strategic uses of the Nicol prism, double refraction, and the ubiquitous Iceland spar, which
?"Of course, this creates other problems. Like having multiple versions of the same person roaming the world simultaneously.
~ p. 370: How music trumps Anarchist theory:
"Yet I've noticed the same thing when your band plays--the most amazing social coherence, as if you all shared the same brain."~ p. 375: Ewball Oust on Iceland spar in Mexico:
"Sure," agreed "Dope," "but you can't call that organization."
"What do you call it?"
"Jass."
"Espato is what they call it down there. Sometimes you hear espanto, which is something either horrifying or amazing, depending."~ p. 377: Pynchon invokes Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury:
"Like looking at somebody through a pure enough specimen and seeing not just the man but his ghost alongside him?"
Ewball regarded Frank with some curiosity. "Plenty occasions for goose bumps down in those drifts as it is. Espantoso, hombre."
They climbed up the red-brown mountainside, into sunlight and purple artemisia, where wild dogs wandered the roofless stones, till they were high enough to see, beneath the harsh radiance of the Good Friday sky, where cirrus clouds were blown to long, fine parallel streaks, the city below, spread east to west, stunned as if by mysterious rays to a silence even Frank and Ewball must honor--the passion of Christ, the windless hush...even the stamping mills were silent, even Silver itself taking its day of rest, as if to recognize the price Judas Iscariot received. Sunlight in the trees.~ p. 391: More Iceland spar: "And there was this deep glow, though not enough ambient light in here to account for it--as if there were a soul harbored within."
~ p. 410: G.K. Chesterton references?:
The boys found their way down to West Symmes Street and into the Ball in Hand, which proved to be a particularly low and disreputable haunt.For some reason, this line made me think of The Man Who Was Thursday's Gabriel Syme and The Ball and the Cross.
~ p. 415: Does Mr. Ace reveal the true motive of the existence of the Chums of Chance?
"You are not aware that each of your mission assignments is intended to prevent some attempt of our own to enter your time-regime?"
Posted by amcorrea at 8:09 AM 2 comments:
Labels: Pynchon, reading list
15 May 2008
A conceptual poem
Director Felipe Aljure visited the set of the current production of Del amor y otros demonios and was impressed by what he discovered:
Las tres productoras coinciden en que uno de los ingredientes que hace parte de su apuesta es el no haber acudido a ningún coproductor extranjero para que entrara en esta producción. Es un concepto lleno de poesía, los buenos productores no se limitan a hablar de plata, pues reconoce una unidad cultural latinoamericana y más aún caribeña, por ser Colombia, Costa Rica y México las tres nacionalidades más activas en el proyecto. Tres productoras, de tres países, pensándose como de una misma nación, es un poema conceptual sobre el cual se erigen otras fortalezas de esta adaptación, como por ejemplo usar actores de la misma nacionalidad de los personajes de la novela para evitar acentos falsos e impostados; o usar a Cartagena como escenario central del rodaje, por ser allí en donde la novela transcurre; o filmarla en español, idioma en el que la novela está escrita. Aunque la película aún no está terminada, Del amor y otros demonios tiene todos los ingredientes para ser un delicado espejo audiovisual capaz de reflejar con fuerza todas las sutilezas del libro.Needless to say, I'm very excited about the potential of this film.
In the meantime, I was delighted to discover A.S. Byatt's 1995 review of Edith Grossman's English translation of the novel:
Mr. Garcia Marquez's pointed and resonant epigraph is from St. Thomas Aquinas's treatise "On the Integrity of Resurrected Bodies": "For the hair, it seems, is less concerned in the resurrection than other parts of the body."Also, I wonder if the opera will be released as an album someday. I look forward to reading reviews of the future performances.
What is body and what survives? What is flesh and what is spirit and what is demonic? Mr. Garcia Marquez's answer is an almost didactic, yet brilliantly moving, tour de force.
Teaching oneself
Another excellent point about litblogs from Dan Green:.
The question is not whether another "opinion" is needed but whether that opinion is linked to a specific analysis of the book--pointing out specific attributes of form, style, or theme through quotation or extended description--that might reveal to other readers some angle of understanding or interpetation they haven't previously considered.In addition, I think writing one's thoughts down in this medium can be a way of teaching oneself. I know that I can have many ideas and impressions about a text, but it isn't until I flesh them out in black and white that I can fully comprehend the nuances and implications of these thoughts--which sometimes extend into even more illumination and ultimately lead to a better understanding of the text itself..
Posted by amcorrea at 2:20 PM No comments:
13 May 2008
Intertextual intermarriage
Eric Griffiths' "Dante, Primo Levi and the intertextualists" is a wonderful essay that explores the erstwhile uses, true definitions, and revelatory functions of intertextuality. Perhaps I'm quoting too liberally here, but I suppose it's more for myself than anyone else. This is the sort of writing I never tire of rereading:
At one point during Dante’s impersonation of Arnaut Daniel, in Purgatorio 26, there occurs a word, “escalina”, which, Prue Shaw points out, “exists neither in Provençal nor Italian”. Amid the gloss of the mosaic, her knowledgeable eye singles out, as it were, one square of matted chewing gum. Maybe the agent Dante mistakenly believed there was such a word; maybe he thought it ought to exist and made it up (neologism is a permanent possibility in any language, reluctantly though langue admits this); maybe a corrupt scribe had a hand in the text, and Arnaut was not describing Dante as “al som de l’escalina” – “on the highest pavement of the stair”, as T. S. Eliot, whom the phrase haunted, once translated it – but as “ses dol e ses calina” (“without pain and without heat”). No system can spare us these “maybe”s. You may call this “literary word” an “intersection of textual surfaces”, but that will not help you cope with the fact that what we come across at this intersection is a crux.And.And
An unargued preference for “more general discursive structure” over attention to a “particular intertextual source” or two has the further drawback that it conduces to fetishism of the categories brought to bear on utterances. “Structure”, “system”, “genre” and “discursive formation” remain drastically under-described pseudo-entities; like nation states, their existence and frontiers acquire a bogus solidity. As in nationalist historiography, sham demarcations are established; a weird protectionism envelops the resultant intellectual domains, so that when a writer like Primo Levi alludes in one of his poems to the “Shema Yisrael” this is called “appropriation” (who was expropriated by it?). Contributors to the Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi think it odd that Levi, a “secular humanist”, according to them, “nonetheless uses the language of the Hebrew Bible in his poetry”. Yet Levi “uses” terms, cadences and their implied commitments from Diodati’s 1603 Italian version of the Script