Perverted Inheritance

I have, alas, not got any further in my quest to read / watch anything that can be considered a classic. I have, however, completed my bookclub book for this month - Saturday, by Ian McEwan.

Hmm.

There are some (Cerebus, for example), who will say I was predisposed to dislike him because my mother dislikes him. Her influence cannot be denied on me, hence my gobbling up of crime novels, I'm sure, and my general irritation with two of the world's grand dames, the Dench and the Streep (although my dislike has waned somewhat). Nonetheless, I think this was all entirely his own fault. It was... infuriating. It all felt--and I hesitate to use this term--terribly contrived. I am also not entirely sure I'm interested in reading this story of this type of man, but I imagine that the Daily Mail & Telegraph loved it.

So yes, prejudiced - but due to the book. However, I shall persevere. My friend has a three-book rule - if you can't stomach an author after trying three of their books, that's it - no more chances. Therefore, given that Atonement is on the Top 100 List, which is acting as our guide, I shall give him one more try.

Alas, as it's finals time, I cannot bear anything too taxing. So it's back to reading trash until I can think properly again, without guilt.

Sub-par-way

I have finally finished the Pamuk. It was actually rather good once I made an effort with it. The problem was reading it on the subway rides to school, which is where I do most of my non-school reading. Some books and authors are simply not designed to be reading in small chunks, and I think Pamuk is definitely one of those. He is too dense, too intricate, and a twenty minute bash simply does not do him justice. Interestingly, where I was successful in engrossing myself in his book was on the long ride down to South Ferry - about 50 minutes or so - which really allowed me to relax into his style.

I thought you would appreciate this piece about how difficult it is to translate Turkish into English, as described by his translator, Maureen Freely, talking about the devrik cümle:

This is a sentence--usually a very long sentence--in which words appear in an order different from that ordained by custom and practice, and cascading clauses create a series of expectations that are subverted by the verb at the very end. The poet Murat Nemet-Nejat has described Turkish as a language that can evoke a thought unfolding. How to do the same in English without the thought vanishing into thin air?

The accepted view, especially among bilingual Turks, is that the translator should pay close attention to the sentence's "inner logic." This might also be desdcribed as its architecture--the elegant way in which the various parts reflect one another and, together, reflect the mystery that must never be coarsened by words; the games with voice and tense and the imaginative melding of different epochs and places in setneces that may be admired at length like pictures in a museum. For those who feel at home inside the traditions of Turking thought, the virtues of this approach are manifest. A translation that is utterly faithful to that inner logic will, in their view, open up like a flower to reveal its inner truth . . .

This passage reinforced to me the problems of reading in translation, and that languages really are structured differently, not just grammatically, but in terms of thought processes. A communication gap really does exist between those who are fluent, and those who are not. Nonetheless, understanding how the language works, and why it is translated in a certain way, does help with the reading. All very interesting, to me, at least.

Stop!

Result! I have signed away yet more of my privacy with a 'fair'-ly secure password, and here I am, ready to confess to never having read 3 Men in a Boat. It seems there's one last copy in Butler that's not in the Rare Books room (!) so I'm going to head downstairs and pick it up. Stay tuned for the twists and turns involved in my finding it (or not!!) on the shelf, taking it to the circulation desk, and trying to avoid checking it out with the scary dude with the latex gloves who is very, very angry at the world.
Anyway, that's it: I'm in. I thought I'd also share this tidbit from Wikipedia with you:

'Among US troops in Iraq, "Three Men in a Boat" is slang for "stop", because of the shape of the Arabic word قف‎ for "stop!"'

Doesn't quite have the punch of 'the suck', does it? What's happening to Army slang? Are they quietly conscripting English grad students? Why do you even need really lengthy slang for 'stop'?

So many questions.

Why Even Bother?

I admit that I have not yet read Three Men in a Boat. In fact, I am still struggling through The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk which is, in my opinion and experience thus far, almost unreadable. I don't know why I'm finding it quite so difficult, but I really am.

Completely readable is, however, The Well of Lost Plots, the third of Jasper Fforde's series about a literary detective, Thursday Next. It is a rollicking read, ridiculous--and the edition I have, kindly lent by a friend, seems unable to distinguish between who's and whose, which drives me NUTS and for which there is NO EXCUSE. Anyway, the point of all this is that there are many literary references in these books which are extremely good fun and make you feel clever for knowing what they mean... which is possibly one reason (albeit dodgy) for reading the classics: That feeling that you are cleverer, somehow, than those who have not yet read them.

Is that wrong?

Is this thing switched on?

So, having inhabited my list of things to do for nigh on three weeks, `post on Grace's blog' has finally made its way to the top. Like cream. Or possibly scum. More accurately, Friday afternoon ennui has pushed everything else on the list down to the point that this is now my most pressing activity. The nice things about `to do' lists is that they convey no actual information on the importance of each list item. For example, the three things I had to do today were:

1/ post on Grace's blog
2/ Write working paper and circulate
3/ eat fruit

and I am going to go home today feeling pretty chuffed that I have completed two-thirds of my goals. Assuming that I can be bothered eating my apple.

I've not got the point of this at all, have I? This is meant to be a forum for confessions about gaping holes in our cultural experiences and searingly insightful discussion regarding our attempts to plug such gaps. Not for self indulgent ramblings better suited to the myspace blog of some subliterate teen. So here are my pithy observations:

a/ Of the observer to 100 books I have read:

3. Robinson Crusoe (though possibly a laydybird classics for young readers edition)
4. Gulliver's Travels
16. David Copperfield Charles Dickens
24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll
31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
33. Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome (well, my dad read it to me as a bedtime story BUT THAT COUNTS)
40. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame Not only that, my brother starred as toad in Hallam middle school's noted performance of the book
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan A classic adventure story for boys, jammed with action, 49. The Trial Franz Kafka
56. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler I(clearly the best book on the list)
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger Which I can prove, to 2 significant figures, is the worst book in the english language.
64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
87. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster
88. The BFG Roald Dahl
97 Atonement Ian McEwan
98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman

Not very many, but I feel particularly aggreived that I am getting no points for having struggled through Crime and Punishment, the outsider, potrait of an artist as a young man or Gravity's rainbow

b/ it turns out, unlike the rest of you illiterate yahoos, I have actually (sort of) read 3 men in a boat, so I would suggest something different. Or I could read lolita while you all read 3 men. We could meet up and you could discuss humorous, heartwarming happenings in your book while I occasionally interject with comments like 'There is no such thing as morality' and 'I feel so dirty'

c/ Can we do a film series as well? I haven't seen goodfellas, Rocky, The Godfather or Dude Where's my Car, and I'm keen to see all 4

d/ Wind-up: Did you spot the subtle hint at the Midsummernight's dream reference embedded in the title of the first blog entry.

Anyway - I feel cleansed. Thank you for letting me share. I'm now going to play shamik at Badminton. Surely no-one could lactate after an activity so manly?

...by moonlight?

I have to admit, the name of this blog is clever in a silly sort of way. Even sillier, though, is the fact that it has taken me this long to work out the pun. I would keep looking at the address every time I came here, thinking, "Huh, illread. Makes me think of something, but..." And then I would get distracted by some other shiny object, lending proof to my sneaking suspicion that my attention span is... I'm sorry, what were we talking about again?

Here's what I like: "Illread" is both a pledge, as in "I'll read," that is, I shall or I will read, the convention of the URL forcing out the apostrophe, and a confession, as in I (to take the most blatantly obvious example) am "ill read."

But I think, too, that this last is also a charming reference to A Midsummer Night's Dream wherein Oberon greets Titania at the first on-stage crossing of their paths with the line, "Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania." That is, this is a crafty, subtle, underhanded challenge, calling us out to read or risk losing some form of (A) handy child, (B) fairy kingdom, (C) pride, (D) magical love-potion, (E) all of the above in the form of our imaginations, allegorized.

Then, too, you have homophony, such that "illread" becomes "isle red," possibly a reference to the ill-fated Red Island of Rovinj, Croatia. How this last works seems slightly beyond my modest powers of interpretation, but I would imagine it has something to do with the rocks upon which the stormy waters of time will toss us should we fail to keep ourselves afloat with the aid of good, solid, surely-everyone-has-read/watched/listened-to-this-except-me culture.

Any others?

It's Not Just The Academy

So, Mr M Scorcese finally recognised by the peeps in Hollywood and given an Oscar. Huzzah! It is, of course, an outrage that he has never won one before. It is, however, just of much an outrage that I rage outishly about this, and yet really haven't seen that many of his movies.

So, throat cleared, here it is. The real list of shame.

Of his movies, I have seen (in chronological order): Mean Streets; Taxi Driver; New York, New York; Bad (by Michael Jackson - seriously, that was Scorcese); The Departed.

I have, therefore, not seen: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore; Raging Bull; The King of Comedy; The Color of Money (seriously though - who wants to? Paul Newman is not enough... Marty, Marty, what were you thinking?); The Last Temptation of Christ (this was him? Really? What did seminary school have to say about it?); Goodfellas; Cape Fear; The Age of Innocence; Casino; Kundun; Bringing Out The Dead; Gangs of New York; or, The Aviator.

Oops. Maybe I should start this whole netflix business and start remedying all this.

But remember: I have seen Bad.