WhirledView

Not Fare Well...

by Cheryl Rofer

We actually have a few clouds in the sky today, and I'm wishing that my blogfriends would send some of their excess rain rather than another of these silly memes. Both Shane and Dave tossed this one my way. I'm wondering how many times it's been around the world electronically. It resembles some I've seen before, with mutations. If we knew the rate of mutation, we might be able to calculate how many times it's been around the world.

The Rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you'd like.

1. Done
2/1. I have an aunt named Albert. (Extra credit to anyone who can tell me where this comes from.)
2/2. I lost my little brother on the New York Subway on the way to the Museum of Natural History.
2/3. I can't think of four more things.
3/4. I don't do this. You guys should know that by now!
5.

The post that I didn't get to writing in place of this one involves India, so here is Krishna instructing Arjuna at the battle of Kurukshetra. I'm not much of a student of the Bhagavad Gita, so I may be getting some things wrong here.

This encounter, as I've understood it, has always bothered me and seems to have some resonances for today. Arjuna looks at the field of battle, sees his relatives on the side he will fight, and says no, I just can't do it, I don't see any way that any good will come of this. The god Krishna sees Arjuna's hesitation and instructs him that the war is his destiny, and therefore, no matter what Arjuna's mortal mind tells him, it is right for Arjuna to use his bowman's skill to kill his relatives. Arjuna goes along with this, and the end is far from a marvelous triumph.

T. S. Eliot used this moment in The Dry Salvages, one of his Four Quartets.

So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

I've found that admonition sometimes to be comforting on a personal level, but as a collective justification for war, it's been too much used.

Image from here.

Weekend Project: Ta Lendab Mesipuu Poole

by CKR

I saw "The Singing Revolution" twice this past week, might see it again. It reminded me of something I've understood quite imperfectly from the last Laulupidu in 2004. This video will give you some of the feeling, I think, although I suspect you had to be there.

I was practically crying with the emotion of the crowd. The memory almost makes me cry now. And the applause insisted on a second singing, which evoked even more emotion.

"Ta lendab mesipuu poole" means "It flies toward the honey tree," obviously referring to a bee. My Estonian isn't good enough to get all the words as they're sung, so I have pondered that title. In the film, there is a reference to the Soviet Union reaching west toward Estonia like a bear toward a honey tree, and just a tiny bit from the song.

So I've found the words:

Ta lendab lillest lillesse,
ja lendab mesipuu poole;
ja tõuseb kõuepilv ülesse -
ta lendab mesipuu poole.

Ja langevad teele tuhanded;
veel koju jõuavad tuhanded
ja viivad vaeva ja hoole
ja lendavad mesipuu poole!

Nii hing, oh hing, sa raskel a'al -
kuis õhkad sa isamaa poole;
kas kodu sa, kas võõral maal -
kuis ihkad sa isamaa poole!

Ja puhugu vastu sull' surmatuul
ja lennaku vastu sull' surmakuul:
sa unustad surma ja hoole
ning tõttad isamaa poole!

I can't quite read it all, but I'm starting to see. Like the bee flies to the honey tree, so my spirit flies toward my homeland. That's not exact; I need to look up some of the words.

And maybe PHK or I will write a review of the film. Quick version: It's a very good film. See it if you can. You don't need to understand Estonian.

Update: The review is here.

Arthur C. Clarke, 1917 - 2008

by CKR

Arthur C. Clarke was an imposing figure of the twentieth century. His chosen field was science and its effects on us. He used the medium of science fiction to explore it.

He is being remembered in the media for the book behind the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," but he wrote many, many other science fiction short stories and novels.

I read somewhere that we mourn not so much for the people themselves who have died, but for the parts of ourselves that end with their death.

He was not my favorite science-fiction writer. I think that my love of science fiction came too early in my life to appreciate his writing, which required more maturity than I had in my teens. I did enjoy "The Nine Billion Names of God," which packed the punch I enjoyed at the time, in a simple, but mind-bending concept: that if all the names of God could be enumerated, the universe would have served its purpose and would end. A computer is programmed to enumerate those names. It succeeds, and the stars begin going out, one by one.

That's a very current story for today in multiple dimensions, many years on from the writing. I still get that same shiver down the back of my neck as I write this.

He imagined geosynchronous satellites long before they were a reality and looked forward to meeting aliens in space in more realistic ways (perhaps - we still don't know what will happen) than other writers. He combined the self-assurance of prediction with the profound humility of knowing that we really don't know what will happen, in the best way that science can.

He was a figure who I paid attention to, someone to be looked up to, someone whose name I noticed in the news, part of my intellectual world. I lost my interest in science fiction a long time ago, but Arthur Clarke continued. I tried to reread some of his books, recognizing that my immaturity might have contributed to my lukewarm response to them, but the science fiction part no longer resonated.

Here are obituaries and tributes from others.

New York Times

Washington Post

The Guardian

Kingdaddy

Armchair Generalist

Shane Deichman. Further links here.

Jaan Kross, 1920 - 2007

by CKR

One of the world's great writers died this week. Jaan Kross was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature a number of times. Much of his work has been translated into English.

The Tsar's Madman and Professor Martens' Departure, the two of his novels that I have read, deal with some of the same themes of The White Ship. Aino Kallas was writing before the Soviet occupation, and Kross after, so his novels contain an additional layer of history through which Estonia's nineteenth century is seen.

His writing is exquisite, the characters strongly drawn so that we feel their conflicting loyalties and necessities. Anselm Hollo is an outstanding translator. I can only claim to having read Kross's work in English, but I recommend it highly.

Some photos here.

Update from Eric Dickens: For a longer list of the novels that Jaan Kross wrote (of the 16, only three are available in English translation) please have a look at the Three Percent website, run from Rochester University, New York State, where I have recently posted a quick overview of all the main novels he wrote.

Other people have written, in English, in more detail about specific books, but I wanted to also mention the books that have never appeared in English, plus his 600-page autobiography, which appeared in 2003.

I myself have translated two books by Kross into English; Anselm Hollo, the Finnish-American poet, a further two. But that's all there is in English. There are six of Kross' works in French, some also in German, Swedish, Dutch, Russian and in Finnish, which language closely resembles Estonian.

Further update by CKR: The link that Eric gives us is an outstanding overview of Kross's novels. Suur tänu, Harra Dickens! I'll also add to the list a lovely little volume that I picked up somewhere, either Milwaukee or Tallinn: The Rock from the Sky, five of Kross's short stories (novellas?), probably translated to English through a Russian translation of the Estonian. It was published in 1983 by Raduga Publishers.

A review of one of Kross's books translated into English.

Tänan väga Giustinol. Sketch from Postimees.

The White Ship

by CKR

Some time ago, Phila was kind enough to send me a small volume he found while preparing to move. The volume was The White Ship: Estonian Tales by Aino Kallas, Translated from the Finnish by Alex Matson, With a Foreword by John Galsworthy.

The publication date is 1929 (“first publication;” this particular book appears to be a reprint, but not too far removed from that time), by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith.

The book was very difficult for me to read. It is a collection of stories from Estonia. They seem to have been collected from elderly people in Estonia about the old days, what we would call today oral history. Much about those old days was not good: the nobility in Estonia was German, having been imported in the thirteenth century by crusading orders, and Estonians were serfs. Estonia was part of the Russian empire, which imposed additional layers of oppression.

One story begins with a joyous wedding. The wedding is interrupted by a summons from the lord of the manor for the bride to come to the manor house. The newlyweds face each other wondering what that would do to them and their relationship. The story ends with the bride taking a knife from her husband, along with a promise that he will join her in Siberia.

Another story has overtones of current religious excesses. A young housewife falls under the spell of a religious sect, follows the group to the beach near Lasnamäe in Tallinn (now a Russian enclave), where they await an revelation that never comes, and she returns to her village, perhaps disenchanted, perhaps not.

The collection starts more positively: Odile, the wife of a councillor of Tallinn, finds it within herself to give a rose to a leper and sees him transformed. Perhaps this is Kallas’s way of suggesting that Estonia’s leprous past might be redeemed, a possibility that would have presented itself in 1929, as Estonia enjoyed its seventh year of independence from Russia.

Aino Kallas was not a familiar name to me when the book arrived in the mail. Estonia has many writers, and I knew nothing more of her than was in Galsworthy’s preface. She was Finnish and wrote in that language, but much of her material came from Estonia, her husband’s home. The book’s translator, Alex Matson, was also Finnish. A bit more about her can be found in this article from the Estonian Literary Magazine.

A recent article in the New Yorker made me think again about this book, which has been languishing on my worktable in the hope of a review. It seems that our DNA contains bits and pieces of viruses that infected our ancestors; killed some of them, even, although others survived by incorporating the virus. How this happens is poorly understood. Viruses that may be close to those ancient viruses have been reassembled from the DNA information of modern humans.

Orhan Pamuk’s Other Colors: A Book Review Essay

By PHK

On the jacket of Orhan Pamuk’s latest book, Other Colors: Essays and a Story, stands the black silhouette of a lone man – hands in his pockets, shoulders shrugged, face away from us – walking on top of a rail of the electric tram line that runs down the left lane of a damp, dark empty cobblestone street illuminated only by the fog smeared light of distant street lamps. In the background, two dark gray minarets of a giant mosque pierce the lighter grey sky. The jacket tells us that Ara Güler took this evocative photograph, that Chip Kidd designed the jacket and that Maureen Freely translated the text from Turkish - but nothing more.

On the surface, Other Colors might appear to be a hodge-podge of autobiographical short essays by Pamuk – many, but not all, that had never been published before. But hodge-podge is not a fair description because these essays are as well-ordered and crafted as a carefully designed complex multistoried, multi-use building by a leading international architect.

As such, these essays, in one way or another provide, the back – or back-back stories of several of Pamuk’s previous works. They’re not essential for enjoyment of reading My Name Is Red or Snow, for instance, but for me at least, they answered questions about characters and locations I had previously had, but not found in the novels themselves or in their prefaces. Yet, what I, as a social scientist, found among the most intriguing in Other Colors was Pamuk’s description of the painstaking research – historical, contemporary, familial and societal – that he undertook to ensure the accuracy of the periods, people and physical surroundings of which he wrote. The tales of murder, intrigue, love –emotions and events that drove these post-modernist novels forward – seem almost incidental.

Neither East nor West

Pamuk accurately characterizes himself as a westernized, secular Turk and his political views – whether he likes it or not – under-pin and replicate part of that complicated, multifaceted push-pull relationship between Turkey and Europe described so explicitly and poignantly in Snow and Istanbul.

He points, in Other Colors, to influences from two great Russian writers - Dostoyevsky and Nabokov. Russia’s intellectuals, too, have felt many of the same ambiguities towards Europe as they, like the Turks – over the centuries – have knocked on Europe’s door attracted like moths to its flame only to be repelled by the flame’s searing heat.

Pamuk’s description of his problems with the dark forces in Turkish politics that charged, tried, but then let him off on a technicality for violating the controversial Article 301 of the Turkish penal code are particularly troubling. Who are these people? Why are they so powerful? What are their motives? Who are their supporters? Why should Turkish writers and others be harassed and intimidated for wanting to know and write the truth about the history of a dead empire that preceded their births and that of their country? Are these dark forces among the same people who have apparently begun to monitor Turks’ access to the Internet? What makes them so afraid? I as a Westerner want to know.

Zombie Words

by CKR

A dead metaphor is one in which we no longer perceive the literal meaning of the words. When I was working on lasers, I was amazed at the number of dead metaphors we use relating to light and sight. All of them came alive in the context of lasers and sounded out of place or even laughable in a scientific paper.

It can easily be seen…
To illuminate the problem…
It appears that…

I don’t recall them all now. I do recall having these little zombies rise up at me at every turn, making writing difficult.

I think that sheer repetition is waking up another dead metaphor. The News Hour, particularly Margaret Warner, has been using it the past few days with regard to President Musharraf, multiple times in an interview. Last night it began to wake. Tonight it was fully mobile.

“When will President Musharraf take off his uniform?”

There are other ways to say this. Resign his commission. End his military status.

Please.

Update: Looks like that dead metaphor is rising for TRex, too.

FRAMING

By PLS

I’ve been thinking about the massive gold frames
that run around a Rubens or Goya in the great
museums. Works of art in themselves, they shout
from a distance: this painting is extraordinary!
The budget framing done by locals who know
how wide a mat should be and if a strip
of gilt, silver or natural wood will enhance
a certain cheap print also charms the naive.

Everything looks so much better in a frame.
Political consultants concur. Even brilliant
solutions to war or taxes aren’t sufficient.
The gravest issues must be framed with stories
voters can’t resist. Like browsers at a flea
market, they’ll buy the frames. They’ll buy the frames!

Wednesday Sevilleta Blogging

by CKR

Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge is an impressive place. It’s located between Albuquerque and Socorro, spanning the entire Rio Grande Rift from the Los Pinos Mountains on the east to the Ladrone Mountains on the west. Most of it is closed to the public, except one weekend a year.

I found out about the open house through Earth Matters, a newsletter published by the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources. I started getting it in dead tree form some years ago; I think they decided to send it to all of us who subscribed to New Mexico Geology. Now I see that both are available on the Web.

The open house offered tours both days of last weekend, but Sevilleta is a two-hour drive for me, and I didn’t want to stay overnight, so I settled for a full Saturday: the Chihuahuan Desert Native Plant Walk in the morning and the Geology East Field Trip in the afternoon. Morning tours came with a breakfast burrito, and afternoon tours came with lunch of a giant chalupa assembled as you watched, to your taste, by members of the La Joya Community Development Association. Red chile, rather than green, becomes the culinary focus as you move south along the Rio Grande Valley, but I tried both. I arrived too late for the breakfast burrito, but I had eaten a light breakfast before I left.

I brought along my latest issue of New Mexico Geology, because its main feature was an article about Cretaceous strata in Sevilleta. Little did I know that one of the authors of that article (Stephen Hook) would show us exactly where he collected his materials for the article. (The article has a good map of Sevilleta in it.)

I have a particular interest in ammonites. Two large and heavy ones sit just outside my front door. John Fowles, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, uses them nicely to represent the past that is gone and mysterious. I bought a small one when I visited Lyme Regis, Fowles’s home.

A Course in Writing

by CKR

I am a great fan of John Fowles. I’ve read most of his books more than once and have a small collection of first editions, signed editions and criticism. I have a paperback of The Magus in which I’ve tried to mark all the allusions to T. S. Eliot, another of my favorites. I have an ammonite from Lyme Regis and a photo of me standing at the end of the Cobb. I even have a copy, first edition, cloth, dust jacket, near fine except for slight foxing, of his 1973 Poems. They’re not as good as Eliot’s, perhaps not very good at all, but they are words from his pen, or maybe typewriter, products of his mind.

Fowles did something unusual with The Magus. The first edition was issued in 1965. In 1978, he published a revised version.

Though this is not, in any major thematic or narrative sense, a fresh version of The Magus, it is rather more than a stylistic revision.

I pick up Fowles paperbacks in used-book stores regularly. I can reread them until they break, then discard them. My collection remains unused. The first copy I bought of The Magus, a paperback, is something I’ve wanted to keep, too, so I have replaced it with new ones. The 1978 version is still in print.