Italo Calvino: Italian Folktales

What a lovely gem to have stumbled across in the bargain bin.  I love Calvino already, and have several of his books on my shelf, and even though not technically his original composition, this one definitely can stand happily next to them.  Discovering it was not unlike unearthing a chest of jewels in your garden when you were only intending to plant potatoes.  Each tale has its own charm, though some of them are charming merely in the familiarity of a new spin on a tale we've already heard in some other form.  Others, however, are entirely original, while maintaining the familiar flavor and tropes of a folk tale--at once sparkling new and  comfortably old.

I know people who collect trifles on a particular theme.  Some collect elephants, ducks, or cows.  Others Star Wars or Lord of the Rings memorabilia.  The feeling this book inspires is that of finding a new, previously unimagined item that fits right in with the thing you were already collecting.  The tropes are so familiar, and the stories so new, that I even set about to categorize them a bit.

Trope	Stories
Princess prisoner of a creature	2, 3, 6
Taking the place of the rightful heir/beloved	2, 3, 12, 16, 32
Prepare three unlikely bribes	3,11, 38
Three impossible tasks	3, 5, 27
Water/grass of life	3, 48
Tricked into suicide	3, 24, 29, 37
Three sisters	4, 9, 12, 19, 24, 26, 29, 35, 50
Omnipotent ring	4, 42
Stave off assault with clever delay	4, 24
Youngest child bravest/cleverest	4,9, 12, 19, 24, 26, 31, 45, 47
Young man sets off to seek his fortune	1, 6, 13, 27, 43
Jealous courtiers’ plot backfires	6, 11, 15
Smuggled into the maiden’s presence	7, 33 45
Ugly, jealous servant/stepmother etc.	8, 18, 31
Jealous older siblings’ treachery	12, 50
Giving birth to an animal	12, 19, 31
Regional characteristics	10, 21
Love beneath its station	13, 22, 31
Three brothers	14, 46, 47
Nuts filled with treasure	14, 19
The frog/snake/parrot etc. prince/ss	14, 15, 18, 19, 30
Sequestered beauty	15, 18, 33, 36
Treacherous old woman intermediary enables insidious royalty	15, 50
Reward for curing the the prince/princess	15, 18, 39, 41
“my son/husband/daughter will eat you if he finds you!”	19, 45
The boy is clever, but the girl is more clever and has her revenge!	21, 36
The comb becomes an obstacle	8, 22
Servants don’t have the heart to kill	23, 31
Maybe unique?	25, 40, 44, 49
Failing to fulfill a simple requirement	27, 35, 45, 50
Laughter is rewarded	29, 38
Maiden dressed as a man	18, 21, 31
Stealing from thieves	13, 31
Seemingly abandoned, enchanted palace	32, 35, 43, 48
Hollow animal that plays music	7, 33

I only went through the first 50 in this way, but one can see the pattern.  What a joy, one that I have already recommended to others.

박경리: 뱁새족

이와 같은 고급 책 읽으면 아직 문학으로 분석할 힘이 없다.  아쉽네.  아직 토지를 읽으면 안 되네.  그러나 문학에 대해서 배운 게 별로 없어도 내 자기 한국어 습득에 대한 걸 배웠다.  읽으면서 단어, 표현, 속담 다 노력하면 이해가 됐지만 책을 전체적으로 이해가 안 되는 것을 보니 나의 다음으로 극복해야하는 장벽을 알게 되었다.  다행이다.  앞길이 보이네.

더 익숙하게 만들어야하는 한국어의 특질은 바로 담화 표지다.  뱁새족을 읽으면서 누가 뭐라고 하는지 추적이 정말 안 되었다.  발언자뿐만 아니라 흔히 장면도 나 모르게 바뀌어 혼란스러워졌다.  이제 한 발짝 뒤로 물러서서 다시 아동책에 초점하겠다.

The Gold Rush

Sometimes we must, in the interest of fairness and objectivity, appreciate a movie in its context.  "Sure the camerawork, effects, writing, or structure weren't up to modern standards, but Intolerance was the first one to even try those things so give some credit", one might reason, or "It Happened One Night is even more impressive when you realize that all the movies of a similar style drew upon it for inspiration."

None of that is the case here.  How often does a movie do better with less technology and convention to draw on?  How often is the first example of something still the obvious best?  How often does a movie create practical effects that afterward have only been attempted in cartoons?  I'd say exactly once, and it is the oeuvre of Mr. Charles Chaplin.

As with City Lights, the director, lead actor, writer, and even composer?!?!?? of this movie did all of those jobs so well that if one didn't know its release date, one would be forgiven for assuming that it had just copied all of the tropes instead of having actually invented them.  At first I was in awe of how wonderfully he had captured the feel and style of a Looney Tunes cartoon.  What a marvelous feat to have reproduced all of those complicated gags without modern technology.  Imagine my surprise when I learned that I had it backward.  The Gold Rush predates Bugs Bunny by a decade.  Bugs Bunny copied Charlie Chaplin, but Chaplin did it so well that I just assumed the opposite.

After first watching this movie, I was affirmed in my opinion that Chaplin was a genius.  But further digging has revealed that I was mistaken.  He is a demigod. 

Catching Up

I don't tend to stick with things.  My attention span--for jobs, relationships, hobbies--seems to be about three years.  I have occassionally stuck with something for longer than that, but at the three year mark, the bloom inevitable fades, and, more often than not I scorch the earth and start over somewhere, something, with someone else.

Which is why it's a minor miracle that it has taken more than a decade for me to ask whether I wanted to continue writing in this blog or not. 

Clearly, I have come down on the side of yes.  But time passes, and memory degrades.  The books that I have reaad in the past few months have left relatively little trace, and I found myself unwilling to stretch them into their own individual posts.  There is precedent, of course.  At the beginning of this blog, some books barely merited a line or two. 

Liu Cixin: The Wandering Earth

Of all the books that I have read during quarantine, I had the most to say about this one at the time I completed it.  I recall wondering if the author was aware of his habits, whether he intended all the short stories in this collection to fit so neatly into the same universe.  Did he recognize as he wrote that his stories were all, in some way, weighing the vitues of being small against those of being large?  Or did he only see it after he stepped back and looked at what he had wrought, like a dinosaur seeing the pattern in a trail of ants that they themselves are unable to conceive?

Margarita Karapanou: Kassandra and the Wolf

I am beginning to sense a theme here.  I don't recall many details from these books.  Any self-styled reader can probably relate to the notion of remembering what you thought and felt about a book, rather than what it really contained.  In this case, the impression was one of a first attempt that was published by accident.  Vivid and evocative, in a way that often seemed to be testing the boundaries of what it could get away with--both in style and substance.  I felt the author reading over my shoulder, like an avid fan who introduces you to their favorite TV show and watches you watching, judging your reaction.

Hisham Matar: In the Country of Men

This item, like the previous one, betrays the weakness of the semi-autobiographical historical trauma novel.  Unlike the Karapnaou's effort, however, I find that I remember certain details, but nothing more.  It has the flavor of a book written because it could be, not because it must.  The author has a dangerous combination of a gift for language, and a vivid life from which to draw, but without a perspective on that trauma that necessitates its recording.

Anthony Jacquin: Reality is Plastic

And this is the opposite.  One gets the sense that Jacquin is struggling to convey exactly what he knows.  One could wish he was a slightly better, more organized writer, that he had a slightly more brutal editor, or that his manuscript was lost in a fire and he was forced to restart from scratch after having discovered in the final pages what he wanted to convey all along.  Nonetheless, of the four, this is the one that I will retain the best, for two reasons:  firstly, I am actually interested in what he has to say, both from a practical and a philosophical standpoint.  That reality is what I say it is--well, this idea is both seductive and compatible with what I tend to believe anyway.  Secondly, and as a result of the first,  I have actually taken the time to dig through his disorganized prose to pull out things that I can apply and, indeed, have.

Jane Gardam: The Queen of the Tambourine

Fate is so peculiar.  Last year a friend was unloading a pile of his books before leaving the country, and I of course accepted them all sight unseen.  I am occasionally guilty of literary tunnel vision, seeing only fiction, poetry, and drama by long dead authors as worthy of my time.  The bag I received from this friend was, by contrast, filled with modern writing, both fiction and non; decidedly outside of my usual wheelhouse.

So were it not for Fate, I would never have read this book--at least not until long after the author had died and it had proven itself worthy.  What a loss that would have been.  At first slightly unimpressed by the epistolary framework, I gradually succumbed to its charm, and by the end admitted that there was no other way it could have been written.  A good book until the last chapters, at which point it revealed itself to have been secretly great all along.  Every seemingly out of place or jarring addition earlier in the book gradually unfolded into a lovely and perfectly intentional flower by the end.  One scarcely noticed the seeds until they had bloomed, and that is, by my definition, literature.  Perhaps an author doesn't have to die to earn the label after all.

Hirotaka Kisaragi: BrotherXBrother

Just another breezy graphic novel, written in Japanese, read in Korean, and written about in English.  Nothing literary or groundbreaking.  And yet . . .

One does wonder about the theme.  Love between (albeit half-) brothers taken to the extreme is appropriate in a Japanese graphic novel.  Certainly not my fetish.  But there is something about the brotherly aspect of male romantic relationships that is undeniably attractive.  It is this dynamic that sets us apart from our straight counterparts, in my opinion, and I have for some years been campaigning to get us our own word, proposing "Theban" as a counterpart to "Lesbian" (to no success).

There are really only two things I want, after all: someone to watch over, and someone to watch over me.  A younger brother, and an older brother.  The three of us against the world,

김원일: 마당 깊은 집

우리 독서 동아리 회원들 모두 다 대구에서 사니까 이 책을 같이 읽기로 했다.  옛날의 대구 모습을 알게 되면서, 그 시대의 시민들이 어떻게 살았는지 배운 후 대구에 있는 "마당 깊은 집 박물권"을 방문해서 직접 이 책에 나오는 장소를 볼 수 있는 게 우리 다 좋은 기회라고 생각했다.  책을 읽고 난 후 우리의 의견이 완전 달라졌다.

친구 한 명은, "그냥 일반 대구 아저씨의 얘기인데" 라고 하며 다른 한 명은, "남성성의 오만"이라고 답했다.  더구나 그 "마당 깊은 집 박물권"으로 가서 자서전도 아니고 그냥 그 시절의 기억을 바탕으로 만든 허구인지 알게 됐다.  더 이상하게 자서전 아니면서 그 박물권 직원들이 굳이 자서전인 척 했고 독촉해야만 그 집, 그 사건들 존재하지 않았다고 인정했다. 

대표적인 한남 김원일.  감정, 철학 없으면서 "내가 하고 싶은 말을 모두 다 들어야한다"고 고집한다.  그 시대의 모습 정말로 알고 싶다면 마당 깊은 집을 무시하고 박원서의 그 많던 싱아는 누가 다 먹었을까"란 정당한 자서전을 읽는 게 좋다.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Don Quixote

What Pottermore house are you?  Are you team Edward or Jacob?  What color is your lightsaber? Do you admit that the most pure lady Dulcinea is the most beautiful of all ladies on this Earth, or do you prefer to die by my hand this very instant?  Have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into your heart? I challenge you to find the difference between these questions.

In chronicling the adventures of The Knight of the Sad Countenance and his squire, Cervantes seems almost to be describing our modern version of fandom, so little has the human phenomenon changed in 400+ years.  The parallels are striking.  Surely there are in your circle those who obsessively devour all media related to their chosen fantasy world: the fans. And likely you also know those who have allowed their fandom to seep even further into their identities, learn Klingon, dress as Sailor Moon, and get tattoos of the Bat Signal: the cosplayers.

But what Cervantes is most interested in here are the most obsessive of fans, those who actually go out into the world in the guise of a their fantasy persona, The Society for Creative Anachronism, Vampire: the Masquerade, the LARPers.  Cervantes does not mock these characters; his affection for his main character is palpable, and those who view the book as a documentary of madness and futility miss the point entirely.  Don Quixote's break with reality is entirely voluntary, as he is early to point out: "'I know who I am,' replied Don Quixote, 'and I know, too, that I am capable of being not only the characters I have named, but all the Twelve Peers of France and all the Nine Worthies as well, for my exploits are far greater than all the deed they have done, all together and each by himself."(54).  Quixote's supposed madness is divinest sense, both through Cervantes' lens, and a reasonable modern one.  Is that which somehow has earned the name "reality" so lovely and magnificent that it would be madness to escape it, or is it quite the other way around?  Is it not more rational to reject nature, red in tooth and claw, and to instead build a true-to-scale TARDIS in your den?  To choose your reality instead of suffering through it?

Which instinct is, of course far more prevalent than one might think at first.  The world is in fact full of LARPers.  Far more than half of all humans are following Don Quixote into the field, even as they vigorously deny it. Unable or unwilling to cope with the desolate waste of reality, they throw themselves into a half-conscious fantasy world created long ago by now dead authors, and have so convinced themselves that they pity those who don't do the same.  We sometimes don't recognize the prevalence of this instinct, because people doing largely don't call it fandom; they call it religion. It is this point that reveals Cervantes' most brilliant, though subtle, observation: the crux of the argument is that when Don Quixote adheres rabidly to the text of his stories, such as "when Carloto left Baldwin wounded on the mountain, a tale familiar to children, not unknown to youth, and even believed by old men, though for all that no truer than the miracles of Mahomet,"  the Don is doing something indistinguishable from religion (53).

It was perfectly safe, of course, for Cervantes to draw a connection between Quixotes' madness and that of the Muslims.  But the Catholics in his book, though they escape such direct comparison, are in no way painted differently from the supposed heathens.  In fact, they suffer from the increased attention, and their irrationally dogged adherence to ancient texts, when placed besides Quixote's, are revealed to be of the same nature.  Cervantes tacit observation is proven true by even casual contact with those ubiquitous LARPers of religion today.  Who is to say that the Bishop's mitre is not in fact a chamberpot that society has agreed not to notice?

Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees

In my early teens, I discovered The Great Brain series of novels by J.D. Fitzgerald, and within a chapter, I was home.  I had never read a book that seemed to be written so exactly for me.  Encyclopedia Brown, while ostensibly on a similar topic, was clearly written by someone who didn't know what he was talking about, had never had the thoughts and feelings that he was trying to describe.  But the titular Great Brain knew, or at least his brother knew, because the stories were true.  This was really what it was like.  I wasn't imagining it.  Somebody understood.

As an adult, I've since found actual people who thought and felt like me.  Sometimes we get along, and sometimes less so.  One would think that such meetings are a comfort, and indeed they often are.  But equally often, they are a warning that whatever gifts I have, they are not in and of themselves enough.  There are so many variables at play in this existence, and so many of them are hostile.  It is vanishingly rare for things to turn out the way people would want them.  And for those of us who think and feel deeply, it is even more difficult because we want so much more.

Cosimo, the eponymous Baron, knew this.  And he couldn't have known this if the author--serendipitously also speaking in the voice of a younger brother--hadn't known it himself.  It is so easy to withdraw, to live in and for oneself, among the trees as it were.  On the surface, scouring yourself free of all the messy variables that come with people and society seems like a cure.  But it is not.  It makes it worse, drives you mad with frustration, until the only end left to you is to hop on a balloon and drift over the ocean.

But there is an alternative to a life in the trees, and it is put so precisely here that I will end by quoting it:

"...association renders men stronger and brings out each person's best gifts, and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest, decent, capable people there are for whom it is worth giving one's best (while living just for oneself very often the opposite happens, of seeing people's other side, the side which make one keep one's hand always on the hilt of one's sword)" (106).

Banana Yoshimoto: Kitchen

Sometimes you meet a person that reminds you so much of what you don't like in yourself, you hate them on sight.  What makes it worse, your similarities mean you travel in the same circles, compete for the same attention, and generally can't escape each other.  This is not a bad thing, necessarily.  Viewed properly, it give one the chance to reflect on her or his own behavior, on the way it affects others, and perhaps make adjustments.

It is unsurprising that the same phenomenon can exist in writers.  I didn't hate this book; in fact my response is rather positive.  Even that positive response, however, is muted by the realization that what weakens her writing is the same thing that weakens my own attempts at fiction.  Her engaging heightened reality, the vivid and memorable characters experiencing deep, recognizable, and universal thoughts and feelings, and her purposefully oblique scene-painting were all effective and engaging.  But they grabbed me in the way that an instagram story does, when they really could have held the weight of a full season of television.

So much was touched upon, underdeveloped here.  I suppose it's a testament that I was left wanting more, wanting to dive more deeply into this world, but wanting more is only a virtue when there is more to be had.  If this novella were the first in a series, I would be addicted.  But after the last page, all I'm left with are withdrawals. 

James Agee: A Death in the Family

Surely, the author could not have known that the titular death would be his own.  And yet, considering the depth of spirit that is evident in this work . . . perhaps he did?  It's entirely plausible that he knew this would his final word, and that the reader would be left behind to put it together in a way that makes sense.
Thus is death, and thus is grief.   They take their version with them, the dead, their director's cut, their final draft. What we are left with is fragments, our version of their story, and it is that which we mourn.  And just as the humans in this book will each hold a different Jay in their mind, so will each reader be left to wonder forever what Agee's final edition would have been.
My Maternal Grandfather will die this week.  He fell, and there's really nothing to do but inter him in palliative care, and then eventually in a hole in the ground in Kansas.  Why was he the way he was?  I have my version, my explanation why a decade ago he decided he never wanted to speak to me again.  Well, he got his wish.
But it is the privilege of the living, and of the reader, to have the last word.  To look at the fragments of stories left behind, and to declare them, as in the case of Agee, good, beautiful, necesary.

Antonio Machado: Border of a Dream

I feel conflicted about these poems, though not about this poet.  On the surface, they are the sort of poems that one reads, enjoys, and forgets.  They are largely snapshots, vivid descriptions of isolated scenes, presumably filed with the sympathy of the poet, but that sympathy is largely left presumed.  Taken as a whole, they give the impression of a sonnet without a turn, a haiku without a final line.  The poet is staring, devoted at the landscape of his memory, relating it in crisp detail to the reader, but speaking over his shoulder at us.  He nevers turns to look us in the eye and slap us with the final quatrain, the stinging glare that leaves a mark.  It is a testament and a rebuke that he is still known as "Antonio el Bueno", for his poems are "good", a word that is appropriately general and delible.

Which is slightly puzzling, considering his devotion to literature and philosophy for which one would never feel the word "good" was appropriate.  In particular, Machado's reverence for Miguel de Unamuno would lead one to expect a certain depth in his work.  Clearly the poet did not shy away from--and was in fact obsessed with--major philisophical questions. So where is this probing intellect in his work?  What is he staring at for so long? What is it that he sees, which is so engrossing he barely notices our presence behind him?

This is the question that burns under Machado's verses, and it is this that he ultimately succeeds in conveying.  It is not the clever answer to the question, the startling insight, that remains with us after reading, as it does with some other poets.  It is the lack of an answer, the fact that the poet himself does not know what exactly has transfixed him, nor why.  We tap on the shoulder of his poems to ask, but he does not acknowledge our presence there, let alone answer.  In the face of such a response, the reader has no choice but to calm his heart, stand next to the poet, and stare with him.

Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers

There's a reason I don't read more of these books, and a reson I should read more of these books, and as with most things they are the same reason. 

It's so easy to think these things.  It's so easy to read a book like this, or any of its popsociopsychology ilk, to polish it off in a day or two and get a rush of accomplishment, and to form some thoughts about it--pro or con.  In this particular case, it was exceptionally easy also to meet with the book club that had chosen it and talk freely about the ideas.  So easy.

By the same token, its easy to forget, after reading the book and in the glow of completion, that there's really not much to it.  It's easy to congraulate ourselves as readers as much as Gladwell congratulates himself on his existence, for being studious, awake, and probing.  But within hours, the aure of sophistication has worn off, and the illusion of thought has evaporated. 

This book was so easy.  Easy to read, easy to agree with, and ultimately, easy to forget.

Tirso de Molina: El Burlador de Sevilla

I'm not entirely satisfied with myself in writing this.  My original goal was to read and write about this seminal book in Spanish, but as you can see, I've failed in at least the latter part of that goal.  My Spanish simply isn't up to the task yet.  And even though I read the original 17th century text in Spanish, glued to a dictionary,  I wouldn't say that I succeeded in that either.  The highly colloquial and idiomatic language used, especially by Catalinón, remains opaque.  I understood the words, but often their implication escaped me.

But even within those constraints, even clouded by my intermediate Spanish and 400 years of linguistic change, the genius of Tirso de Molina is unmistakeable.  The dramatic imagination required to have created this work is so far out of the realm of what was being created at that time is astounding.  There are those who say that the basic building blocks of the legend predate Molina, but no proof seems to be extant for such a claim.  It is perhaps true that Molina drew from a variety of Spanish legends for his masterwork, but this is certainly no mere adaptation of a folk tale.  It does not seem to be exaggeration to say that Molina gave birth to Don Juan, rather tahn simply giving him a voice.

Neither is this mere entertainment.  Each character is there to deliver a message, but most marvelous to this reader is that it remains open to dispute what the message of the play itself is.  It would be easy to craft a case that Molina, a devout monk, was crafting a cautionary tale about sacrificing one's soul to earthly delights, and the dangers of relying on the sacrament of confession to ensure one's own salvation. But suppose that Don Juan had managed to go to confession just before meeting with the stone guest.  Such is not out of the realm of possibility.  What, then, would have been his fate?  Would the sacrament have saved him from damnation?  The play would ahve taken on an entirely different meaning.  This question opens the way for a reading of El Burlador as an indictment, rather than an endorsement, of the Church's approach to sin.  In fact, isDon Gonzalo's innocent but sudden death without that sacrament any different than Don Juan's?  The fact that he reappears as an agent of Hell does not indicate a favorable end for him, however potent his revenge.

On every level to which I have access, this play is a masterwork.  Molina's dramatic instincts are positively Shakespearean in their precision; he knew exactly what to put on the stage.  His characters are all indelible, and the eponymous villain so much so that he has become inextricable from world culture.  Underneath these skillful layers, however, lies perhaps the best part of the play: its earnest wrestling with an irresolvable philosophical question in terms accessible to even the lowest of brows. Would that my Spanish were strong enough to discern if the topmost layer, the words themselves, are of as incredible a quality.  I suspect that they are, and perhaps I will one day be able to appreciate them.  But even if they were as dry as stone, the play would still be a pillar of world literature.

Tomas Tranströmer: The Great Enigma

I owe several things to Rebecca LaRoche.  First among them is a string of apologies for being a complete twat; I was the very model of a self-important undergrad, and she deserved better from me.  The second debt is for a great many ideas about teaching itself, rather than about specific literature.  The third is for moments of clarity with regard to my own writing, and I still don't know how she found the stomach to deal with me considering the aformentioned twatness.

Among those insights that fall under the third category is a something she said about a poem that I thought very good, but she described as "about something I don't feel I have access to".  What was to me perfectly clear was, to someone unfamiliar with my internal workings, opaque and meaningless.  I have precisely the same reaction to many of the poems contained in this volume.  Tranströmer is clearly conveying something very meaningful and clear to him, but to me it fells like a description of an artwork, rather than the work itself.  Without access to what is being described, the description itself is beautiful but meaningless.

This effect is likely a result of Tranströmer's habit of transcribing dreams into poems.  Often, this is explicit, but more often he forgets to mention that what we are reading arises from a fugue state and is correspondingly unbeholden to reason, and immune to understanding.  These moments are not unlike art by Miro or Kandinsky, where the arrangement of shapes and colors itself is the work, and meaning is not a factor.

But in those moments where the dream brushes against reality, where whatever Tranströmer was thinking overlaps in some way with my own spirit, the result is magical.  It is the perfection of synaesthesia, where not only do all sounds have colors and vice versa, but everything is perceived by all senses at once.  Everything in these poems has a color, a voice, a scent.  It is no great feat for a poet to draw connections between two or three things in a simple metaphor.  But Tranströmer goes so far beyond metaphor as to render the word meaningless.  And not only does he give every thought a texture and a flavor, but also hands and lips and eyes.  We can see and feel and taste these poems, but they can also do the same to us as we read them.  Tranströmer captures ideas like bugs in jars, revealing to the reader that even "the ground [is] alive, that there [is] an infinite world of creeping and flying things living their own rich life without paying the least regard to us", and he didn't stop there but "caught a fraction of a fraction of that world and pinned it down in [his] boxes" (Museums).

Wuthering Heights

I'm not sure by what criteria this movie should be evaluated.  It would seem remiss to not include "faithfulness to the source material" as a criterion.  Adaptations exist in a vacuum even less than original works.  By that measure, and within the limits of my memory, the film passes fairly well.  I do not recall enjoying the book, rather finding the characters unsympathetic and dreary, and the structure unnecessarily meandering.  The movie, by way of contrast, was tightly woven, and the performances gave depth and sympathy, especially to poor doomed Heathcliff.

Even viewed on its own, the movie was perfectly watchable.  Score, direction, cinematography, and performance were all of a very high level, and I suppose I can't find fault with its inclusion in the AFI's "100 Movies" list.  But my reaction to the movie itself is exactly as tepid as it sounds.  It was . . . fine.

Evaluation, however, is not the only way of reacting to a work--either written or filmed.  There is something about the story of Heathcliff that transcends evaluation.  I, an inveterate evaluator, have no special place for it in my memory; I can barely remember reading it at all, though I believe I wrote a paper on it as an undergrad.  But its fans are legion, and mysteriously fanatic.  There is something about Heathcliff that speaks to people, making the book a legend, and the movie, to be honest, far more well-regarded than it merits.

Perhaps if I were to read the book again, I would find in the text that which was rather clearly woven into the film: that the worst people we meet often have very sound reasons for being that way.  The call is implicit in portraits of such tortured bastards that we should endeavour to understand them before passing evaluation.  That even terrible miscreants were once pure and innocent.  That all such Heathcliffs need is love, and all cruel and vile men deserve forgiveness.

It seems to be on this level that those who have a soft spot for the book, and I suppose the movie, react to it.  It is seemingly irresistible for a certain subset of optimistic romantics to embrace horrible people, trying to save, redeem, or heal them.  I have several personal acquaintances in mind when I write this, and know of far more second-hand.

As for me, it is likely a character flaw that I do not react to them the same way.  I have infinite patience for children, but once Heathcliff is an adult, his tragic youth ceases to be an excuse.  At a certain point we all, myself included, must heal and grow and unfuck ourselves from our universally tragic youths.  Only then can we lay claim to a greater evaluation than "fine".  The book was fine.  The movie was fine.  And the many Catherines in my acquaintance are fine.  But if any of them want a better reaction than that from me, they would do well to grow up.

An-Nisa

It is surely vanity that I enjoy the holiness of my own letter B this much.  I do not, however, entirely endorse Hulusi's interjection of it here.

1: If this verse is to be any indication, along with the epigraph, Hulusi is growing more comfortable intersting Sufi interpretation in the text--and not always with appropriate denotation.  Which is not to say that his ideas cannot be found in this excellent verse.  Merely that, as in all literature, explication can weaken the message and detract from the joy.

2-3: Hilarious and revealing that Women are given the epithet اليَتامىٰ (orphans) here, and there is no dispute among three translators that it is indeed the correct rendering.

4: Not entirely clear what fiscal policies were in place.  We in the West think of a dowry as a gift to the wife's parents, not to herself.

5-6: Are we not then referring to marriage, but to actual orphans, or to a man's sisters after their parents' death?

7: This is no doubt one of the verses people have in mind when they refer to the Quran's relative liberality toward women.  All things are relative, after all, and this is at least better than what Moses would grant.

8,9: Perhaps a corollary of the so-called "Golden Rule", flawless in its reasoning and appeal to compassion and fellow feeling

10: . . . but followed up, of course, with a more practical appeal to fear and loathing.

11: Again, liberal and feminist . . . by comparison. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the dubious math of this portion gave rise to plenty of conflict across the centuries.  The last part of this verse is the most interesting to me, though.  What a lot of conflict this could have prevented if common in the West!

12: I am extremely curious to know how many rich Muslim women there are in the world.  If this law were executed faithfully, there should be quite a lot. 

13,14: . . . of course every edict has to be thus punctuated.  

15: Again, extremely liberal by contemporary standards.  Not only are double the witnesses required by the Hebrew god necessary, but the punishment is relatively lenient.

16: A rare moment where Hulusi's liberty with the text takes him backward.  He translates this verse as saying "two men," but all other translations, and the dictionary, agree that وَاللَّذانِ is "any two people".

17, 18: Oh, another lovely distinction.  Repentance here is not some easy out.  It is much more specific, and the type of silliness we see in Christianism is specifically prohibited.

19, 20: I wonder if there was any resistance to this proscription at the time it was given.  We need only take a look at the fragile masculinity on display today to infer how easily it would have been to perceive it as an assault on the patriarchy, and trigger male defensiveness.

21-26: It would be easy, blinded by the relative liberality toward women and respect of their rights, to lose sight of some key facts:

• "You" in this book means "Men."  Women are the objects of this discourse, not the subjects.
• Marriage is still treated as an exchange of goods and services, and this transactionality only reinforces the objectification.
• No mention is made of women's right of refusal, insofar as goods cannot decline to be purchased.

Nonetheless, it is even more striking than I expected how much leverage women are given.  How on earth is it justified, then, to deny women rights on such a level as is seen in modern Islamic countries?  Where did the leap from "Treat women justly or burn forever" to "Who said you could drive, bitch?" happen?

27-28: or, "Misery loves company".

29-30: An interesting equivalence between wealth and life.

31: Rather a more reasonable and charitable demand than that of the Christian god.

32: This verse seems to contradict itself.  At first it makes the reasonable suggestion not to covet, for all things come from Allah.  This is based on the assumption that Allah gives unequally, however.  The following assertion that all get what they earn loses its way.

33: Seemingly a non sequitir.  If patterns hold true, this will be revisited in a few verses.

34-35: And here is the answer to the seeming contradiction in verse 32.  When it exhorts the reader not to covet another's position, it really means "Don't feel bad because your husband beats you.  You deserved it."

36-42: It had been a while since we got a warning against duality, but here it is.  Hulusi's nuanced interpretation makes the connection between unity and generosity rather easier to follow than other more literal renderings.  It also highlights the real problem with arrogance: it is rooted in duality.

40: Ok, this really seems like a bud that will bear fruit later.  All three renderings give لَدُنهُ as "Himself" or some variation thereof.  The dictionary meaning, however, is "elastic" or even "spandex" in one dictionary.  Furthermore, none of the possible translation given in the reverse, from the English "himself", are anywhere close.  I need to keep an eye out for this in the future, because it could be marvelously revealing.

43-45: I have come to instinctively assume the Prophet means "Jews'n'Christians" Whenever he uses this expression.  Interesting that Hulusi does not make his usual choice of leaving the Names untranslated when it comes to نَصيرًا, especially notable because his rendering emphasizes the وَكَفىٰ in the same verse.  Hulusi doesn't even bother to include the former in his comprehensive introduction, as he does with the latter.  

46: Yes, of course.  As predicted above.

47: Hulusi's explanation of these creative curse is as good as any, I suppose, but it does not seem to capture the essence of it.

46-57 This lengthy diatribe seems completely unrelated to the rest of the book.  The generous explanation is that An-Nisa, and even the whole of the Quran, is really about one thing, namely "one thing", and everything is to be read on some level as an invective against duality.  A less generous reading might be "The Prophet let his anger run away with him."

58: "Trusts" here seems to be used in a way other than "credibility", but neither the three renderings I am referencing, nor the dictionary itself is any help in parsing it.

59-60: Taghut appears again, and my fuzziness on the concept is palliated by complete disagreement between the three renderings. If a figure other than of speech, a fascinating one.

61-70 And another lengthy diatribe against "Jews'n'Christians".  It might be fruitful to keep track of these digressions.

69: I'm suddenly quite curious about the distinction between الرَّسولَ and النَّبِيّينَ. One would be tempted to say that the former was Muhammad, and the latter lesser prophets, if the latter were not pluralized earlier in 64.

71-77: And now a call to war! This book has gone right off the rails of its original topic.

78: This is pretty sound reasoning, and gets to the crux of the matter: there is basically one message in the Quran, and it is very simple and very difficult.

 79: Hulusi keeps adding things to make his point, but they are not in the text.  It seems that he most often does it to emphasize his pet mystic concept: the various powers of the Names in our own selves.

Speaking of which:

Running list of the Names referred to (started late, so possibly incomplete): 

Rahim: merciful

Aleem: all-knowing

Aliy: exalted

Kabir: great

Habir: all-aware

Afuw: all-excusing

Ghafur: all forgiving

Waliyy:  ally

Aziz: mighty

Hakim: wise

Sami: all-hearing

Basir: all-seeing

Tawwab: clement

Muqeet: watchful

Hasib: reckoner

80: none of which are to be confused with the Rasul, who is somehow both the topic and the addressee of this verse.

81: And neither does Wakil here seem to have the same weight as the above names.  

82: I will say that there do not seem to be the same inconsistencies in this text as in others of its class--no doubt due to its relative recency and singular purported authorship.  this is not to say, however, that it does not occassionally speak out of both sides of its mouth.

83: And we are back here to the curious question of the addressee.  Based both on plurality and content here, The Rasul does not seem to be addressed directly.  These shifts are disorienting, but may hold a key to some larger perspective.

84: A nice verse, and one I'm tempted to frame in my familiar paradigm of process v. product.

85: The line between a divine name and a simple descriptor is blurry. Capitalization of Muqeet here in one version, and transliteration in another, seems to argue for the former.  Simple lower-case translation in another version argues for the latter.  

86: And the same here with Hasib.  I do like this sentiment, though I can't imagine many humans being able to bring themselves to do it.

87: The suffix هُ here is given special treatment in Hulusi's rendering.  It makes me terribly curious about the semantic content of it.  It doesn't seem to have any innately.  I need to be on the lookout for incidences of the Divine Name without it, or it as a suffix in other contexts.

88: The idea of divine misdirection , here and in other similar texts *coughthebiblecough* is wildly grating to me.  Is belief a matter of divine selection, or of choice?  It seems to be a terribly important distinction, and this is not the first time this text has fallen on what I consider to be the unsustainable side of it.

89: If they have been led astray by divine will, then how would it be possible for them to reverse course in this way? The dichotomy has the aroma of convenient selectivity about it.

90: Another surprisingly progressive sentiment, and one that seems ignored by modern Islam.

91: This verse, on the other hand, has a fascinating blank space in the middle.  Those whom readers are given sanction to kill with impunity are those who have given into temptation, but the three texts I'm referencing here are at odds with regard to the nature of that temptation, and each sees fit to insert a non-textual explanation: polytheism, disbelief or hostility variously.

92-93: The idea of a hostile believer is somewhat prescient here.  At the time this book was written, which seems to be rather later than its placement in the canon would indicate, were cracks already beginning to appear among the followers of Islam?  Or is this a reference to their perpetual foes the Meccans?

94: A return to the ideas of v.90, with the same skeptical eyebrow from this reader.

Camilo Jose Cela: Journey to the Alcarria

"As always, the traveler doesn't realize he has put his foot in it until he's in belly deep" (63).  Referring in the second person to his own tendency to say the wrong thing and offend his listeners, Cela was rather more prophetic than he could have realized at the time.

Such a shame too.  If he were not such an engaging storyteller, a traveler seemingly after my own heart who believed as I do that "it's much more pleasant to come upon things as it were by chance than to go look at them in a  place where you know they'll be set up to perfection", if he were not so carefully offhanded with his reflections and descriptions on the journey, then perhaps I would not have been engaged enough to find out what sort of man he really was. 

And so it seems to always be with those who rise to grace in general, or our graces in particular.  The bigger they are, so to speak.  And what are we to do when a writer who we were fully prepared to follow through the Alcarria, retracing his steps, says something so grotesque of our precious and sacred Federico Garcia Lorca as "ni a favor ni en contra . . . Me limito a no tomar por el culo"? The same thing as when Kevin Spacey, 고은, or any other revered figure is revealed to be terrible and predatory.  We look at him with new eyes.  They are not changed; we are.  We grow weary and skeptical, but also clear and cautious.  Our perspective is broadened, and we see more that the scene with Elena and Maria, framed by the writer as a simple misunderstanding of artless peasant girls, was likely to have been something entirely different (103), or that the unnamed town where they threw him into jail, through no fault of his own, might actually have not had the wrong idea about him (5). 

At any rate, Cela turns out to have been a man, and a cautionary tale at that--not against traveling alone, but against expecting those whose art we enjoy to be any better humans than the rest of us donkeys.  As Pedro González Zerolo observed of Cela, "Que tenga en cuenta que un Premio Nobel de Literatura sólo acredita un buen hacer literario, no supone calidad persona".

조남주: 82년생 김지영

이 책때문에 한국 사회에서 논란이 이르킨다고 하는 게 아니라 이 책에서 표시되어있는 현상 때문이지만 그래도 한국 사람한테 "82년생 김지영"을 엉급하면 바능이 심할 수 밖에 없다.  내가 한국 남자한테 엉급했고 "이와 같은 논란 시키는 책이 없으면 좋다"고 했으며 한국 여자한테 엉급했을 떼 좀 놀랍게 "내가 잘 아는 현실인데 읽으면 화만 나니까 안 읽을래" 그렇게 답했다.

그 여자의 답이 맞다.  한국 여자들이 잘 아는 내용을 왜 읽어? 그래도 뒤에 포함되어있는 작품 해설의 "우리 모두의 김지영"이란 재목을 읽어 "여자만 읽을 만 한 책이냐"는 생각이 들었다.  "우리 모두의 김지영"이라면 그 해설의 데상 "우리"에 들어가는 독자가 여자만인가? 그러면 안 된다고 생각한다.  그 반데로 한국 여자가 읽을 필요가 없고 한국 남자 모두다 읽어야만 하고 읽은 후 주변 여자들한테 "정말 그렇냐" 묻으면 눈이 휘둥그래질 것이다.

Nicholas Ostler: Empires of the Word

One reason I don't read many modern fiction books is because they tend to leave little for me to say, and this is a perfect example.  Were this book fiction, philosophy (which is cognitive fiction), or analysis, I would feel free to react to it and offer my own thoughts.  But insofar as it is strictly objective fact, what could I possibly say?

And it is probably because of this attribute that I don't really feel that it stuck with me.  Ostler is such a scholar, so clearly objective, that his writing style leaves something to be desired.  I'm not saying that I would have preferred a narrative, but a little more attention to structure--viewing the book as an integrated whole, rather than a collection of facts--might have helped it stay with me a little more.  As it is, I could not say that I left this objectively valuable and fascinating book with much more than a fuzzy idea of its contents.

한국이민재단: 한국사회 이해

이와 같은 교과서는 해석 할 만한 책 아니지만 관련 과정을 이수한 것에 자랑할 만하다.  법무부에서 나온 책이라 선전을예상했지만 생각 보다 덜 그랬다.  한국의 앞뒷면 양쪽을 제대로 밝혔으며 도전되면서 좌절감시키지 않은 어휘와 문법은 내가 가져있는 한국어 수준에 딱 맞았다.  광고도 아니고 자랑도 적당하게 하고 어렵고 다양한 정보를 간절하게 전달해서 그 과정을 안 다녔어도 읽을 만한 책이다.