Enmendándole la plana a Flaubert

Al llegar al pie de la cuesta, Rodolphe aflojó las riendas. Arrancaron al unísono, de un solo impulso y una vez llegados a lo alto, los caballos se pararon de repente y el gran velo azul del sombrero de Emma volvió a caer sobre su rostro.*

* Aquí me he permitido enmendarle la plana a Flaubert, que se limita a decir "son grand voile bleu retomba" , o sea "su gran velo azul volvió a caer", pero lo he hecho porque me parece que quedaba confuso. Y además, más adelante se ve que Emma llevaba un sombrero con velo. (N. de la T.)

(Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary. Tusquets Editores, Colección Fábula. Traducción de Carmen Martín Gaite.)

El discurso de la maternidad

Visto en La Voz de Galicia:

es frustrante ver a muchas jóvenes que aún piensan como sus tatarabuelas, chicas que adoptan actitudes agresivas típicamente masculinas, muy conservadoras, esclavas de los patrones de belleza impuestos y que vuelven al discurso de la maternidad como prioridad vital.

Si esas tatarabuelas retrógradas no hubiesen aceptado el "discurso de la maternidad como prioridad vital", esas jóvenes cuya carencia de ortodoxia feminista hace sentir frustración a la entrevistada no existirían.

O sea, parafraseando: "resulta frustrante que muchas jóvenes de hoy en día tengan objetivos vitales similares a aquellos que, cuando fueron perseguidos por sus propias antepasadas, permitieron que tales jóvenes llegasen a existir en primer lugar."

I doesn't take much time to fill up

One might at first be surprised that Clovis descendants could reach Patagonia, lying 8,000 miles south of the US-Canada border, in less than a thousand years. However, that translates into an average expansion of only 8 miles per year, a trivial feat for a hunter-gatherer likely to cover that distance even within a single day's normal foraging.

(Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel)

It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e. no exotic faster-than-light propulsion such as "warp drive", and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.[2]

(Wikipedia entry for Self-replicating spacecraft. See also: Fermi Paradox.)

For any reasonably long-lived culture, its romantic initial period of expansion and "frontier spirit" is bound to be relatively short compared to the full extent of their continued existence. To idolize such a transient epoch of its history -to nostalgically pine for it- is more than a bit immature. Like a full grown man stuck in his childhood to an unhealthy degree.

Hoarding ebooks

We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too whose pages are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings of a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here -though I can no longer tell you where- no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books that the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear as an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other.

(Gene Wolfe: Shadow of the Torturer)

Inconspicuously lodged among my books, there is a CD box which is slowly being filled with content downloaded from places like the Internet Archive and Google Books. I'm pretty sure the box holds more books than my "real" library, if that's not the case already, it will soon be.

I know that having permanent local copies of all that content is stupid. Why don't just create some bookmarks, and download each text just before reading? But some primitive part of my brain with an atavistic penchant for hoarding wants it that way.

Reading a book from the screen is always a painful experience, but I've found that reading DJVU files is slightly better that reading HTML or plain text. These latter formats seem strangely unsubstantial and fragile, the letters ready to scatter like fallen leaves and the merest stirring in the electronic ether.

Raster formats like DJVU feel more weighty, less impermanent. Some books from the Internet Archive even have scribbled marginalia, which goes a long way to give the feeling of a real book. (Supposedly, this digitized copy of Amiel's journal has notes and marginalia by none other than Herny Miller.)

Some recent finds:

• Sir Henry Layard: Early adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia. part 1. part 2.


• Baron de Tott: Memoirs.


• Rafael Cansinos-Asséns: Salomé en la literatura.


• Trollope: Domestic Manners of the Americans. part 1. part 2.


• Oliver Wendell Holmes: The autocrat of the breakfast-table.

Spain's decline: what were the causes?

Spain is in many places, not to say most, very thin of people and almost desolate. The causes are:

1. A bad religion.
2. The tyrannical Inquisition.
3. The multitude of whores.
4. The barrenness of the soil.
5. The wretched laziness of the people, much like the Welsh and the Irish, walking slowly, and always cumbered with a great cloak and long sword.
6. The expulsion of the Jews and Moors, the first of which were planted there by the emperor Adrian, and the later by the Caliphs after the conquest of Spain.
7. Wars and plantations.

(Francis Willughby: A Relation of a Voyage made through a great part of Spain [1673])

Eerie!

As one commenter to this BLDGBLOG post notes, the long-exposure photographs by Alexey Titarenko for City of Shadows are reminiscent of some paintings by Zdzisław Beksiński featuring massed corpses marching.

Like this one.

Happy nightmares!

Songs of the Dying Earth

The Jack Vance tribute anthology Songs of the Dying Earth seems to be shaping up nicely. The anthology is reminiscent of other projects like The Last Continent: New Tales of Zothique and Night Lands Vol I: Eternal Love. (Author John C. Wright contributed to the latter, and will have a story in the Dying Earth one, too.)

Here are some of my hopes for "Songs...". First, I hope that they do not sacrifice any creative possibility for the sake of story consistency or continuity, either with Vance's original work or among the new stories themselves. Vance is not Tolkien; he usually isn't very concerned about such matters.

Second, I hope that not all of the stories recycle old places and characters invented by Vance. Sure, it would be nice to read about ol' Cugel again, but it would also be interesting to expand the Dying Earth universe with brand new characters and locales.

Third, and most important, I hope stories are featured that go beyond merely imitating Vance's style and touch on some the deeper themes (the grim view of humanity, the cultural relativism, the religious satire...) underlying the Dying Earth tales. Not necessarily to agree with them; perhaps to comment on, subvert, or criticize them!

In that respect, I'm really intrigued about contributions by women authors like Paula Volsky, Elizabeth Moon, and Liz Williams, because anyone interested in giving a female (feminist?) perspective on the Dying Earth stories will have a lot to chew on.

For example, what do they think about T'sais/T'sain? In that storyline, women are created in vats, their physical and mental characteristics determined by the whims and preferences of powerful male mages. Do they find this reworking of the Frankenstein/Pygmalion myth disturbing? Do the mages have too much power over their female creations? T'sain doesn't seem to mind, but presumably her brain was designed not to mind. Maybe T'sais is the sane -if unhappy- one?

What about the unflinching cruelty directed against female characters in the Cugel stories? Granted, the Gugel stories feature cruelty against pretty much everybody, but still... Derwe Coreme (oterwise a powerful and independent character) is abandoned to sexual slavery at the hands of the Busiacos. It is also implied that Cugel raped Derwe. At one point, he uses extortion to gain sexual favors from another woman.

Finally, the first Rhialto the Marvellous story is a reenactment of the war of the sexes featuring mages and witches, and a (kind of funny) apology for traditional gender roles.

I can't wait to get my hands on "Songs..."! The planned Wild Thyme, Green Magic also looks interesting. Now, if only they decided to reprint Bad Ronald...

If everybody is special, then nobody is

Their latest cinematic effort seems like a particularly barbed response to Brad Bird's The Incredibles and Ratatouille: we are told that the way to make something special is simply by believing that it's special. Which, as Bird taught us, means you can apply that label to everything and everyone until nothing and no one is really special.

(Ian Pugh's review of Kung-Fu Panda at Film Freak Central)

I'm surprised to see guys at Film Freak Central praising The Incredibles in this and some other of their reviews. Because Brad Bird's movie conveys a truly warped message under the guise of wholesome family entertainment.

The line "If everybody is special, then nobody is" is uttered two times in The Incredibles. First by Mr. Incredible, upon learning of the bullshit prizes for trivial tasks peddled by his children's school. Here it is meant that we must not stifle the talented by dumbing down our notions of achievement in the pursuit of a false sense of equality. I'm OK with that.

The second time, the line is uttered by the villain Syndrome, when he threatens to make available his technology -that would allow any person to gain superhuman abilities- to all the people in the world:

Syndrome: Oh, I'm real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your precious gifts, your oh-so-special powers. I'll give them heroics. I'll give them the most spectacular heroics the world has ever seen! And when I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll sell my inventions so that *everyone* can have powers. *Everyone* can be Super! And when everyone's Super...

[chuckles evilly]

Syndrome: No one will be.

(imdb)

This is presented as a BAD thing. However, there's nothing wrong with the idea! Brad Bird seems to be saying that if the unwashed masses were as truly "talented" as the Incredibles, that would be a triumph for mediocrity. It is not enough for the talented to be respected and encouraged, the untalented must be kept down!

Note the sneaky shift in meaning: from promoting a honest appreciation of differences in talent, we have come to regard these differences as good in themselves, and as something that must be preserved even if the means exist for putting everybody at a level comparable to the elite.

Syndrome, though flawed, is the true hero of The Incredibles. In fact, he is an avatar of Prometheus: he wants to confer upon humanity powers which until then were jealously guarded by the Ayn Randian camarilla formed by the Supers.

Note also that there are no tinkerer or gadgeteer-type Supers in the movie (besides Syndrome). All the powers of the so-called "good guys" seem to be innate. Syndrome, lacking any special powers, had to work really hard to develop his technology as a substitute. That has more merit in my view than being the winner of the genetic lottery. (Of course, it could be said that Syndromes's intelligence is itself a superpower.)

Las carreteras deben rodar

- Os digo, hermanos, que ya es tiempo de que dejemos de enviar respetuosas peticiones a la Comisión de Transportes y usemos un poco de acción directa. Dejémosles hablar de democracia; eso son tonterías... !nosotros tenemos el poder, y somos los hombres que contamos!

(Robert A. Heinlein: Las carreteras deben rodar)

Otro relato de ciencia ficción que trata el tema de las huelgas es Esquirol, de Isaac Asimov. Como también, probablemente, lo hace El Talón de Hierro de Jack London.