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In the Mood for Reading (Eco, Murakami, Sueskind…)

I shall start reading Murakami as soon as I finish Umberto Eco’s new novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. It is a story of a man in his 60s (very much resembling the Master himself), who after an accident lost his explicit memory, i.e. the one associated with emotions. As a result, he remembers everything he’s ever read and speaks in quotes, but when looking at a wedding photo of his parents, he doesn’t remember who they are. All feelings brought up by drinking hot tea and brushing teeth are new (although he’d definitely experienced those before). The book, hence, is the story of a man in search for his lost emotional memories (shall we call it experience?)

Although I already find the book interesting, I couldn’t help pitying myself that I’m reading it in English translation. I should’ve read it in Italian. The problem with translation of this particular text (or rather, its first chapter) is that all characters speak similarly. Now and again I was catching myself on a thought that there’s not much difference between how a doctor, the protaginist (an antique book dealer) and his wife (a psychologist) speak. It’s like one person talking all the time. The wife is particularly disturbing, her speech is so scholastic and unnatural, I began to ponder if I might sound like her at times – which, if I do, is pretty dreadful. [I’m also absolutely sure that I never sound like her, but literature has indeed manifested its power by confusing me]. Anyway, I’m looking forward to next chapters. Oh, there are many illustrations in the book, some in colour.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is published by Vintage Books (London, 2006), translation by Geoffrey Brock.

For some reason, I wasn’t impressed with anything I saw on the ‘Recommended’ bookshelf in the new Waterstones in Manchester. I know I nearly bought a little book by Jerome K. Jerome, but put it on the shelf, went elsewhere, and eventually forgot to buy it. But the books on the ‘Recommended’ stand didn’t hook me. Ten years ago, when I was attending an English class with a native speaker (twice a week, in addition to my normal school hours), one of the topics we once discussed was our reading habits. One member of the group, a medical student in his final year, said that he’d normally read first 10 pages, and if they failed to impress him, he’d put the book back on the shelf.

Back then, being incorrigibly romantic and untarnished by much experience, myself and two other students protested ardently against this student’s ‘erroneous position’. Ten years later, and especially after visiting Waterstones last week, I’ve begun to feel that 10 pages is sometimes too long. Needless to say, when you read exclamations like ‘I couldn’t put the book down!!!‘ coming from a critic writing for a very old and respected edition, you kind of feel confused and even disturbed, if you fail to appreciate the book’s ingenuity. But it’s not my fault that of about seven books that I went through five (!!!) started with a similar exposition. I know definitely that in two of them a protagonist found himself waking up, and in another two the protagonist was riding or driving somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that before an author writes the first sentence, s/he has to go through their entire library, to check if this first sentence is totally original. Equally, I don’t know why those phrases and even styles in which they are written look and sound so similar to one another. I’ve recently gone through several publications of the new Russian poems, and I couldn’t help noticing that most of them are even written in the same metrical foot. This is something I have to say about The Da Vinci Code – although it was a dull and dragging reading at times, it was at least captivating in the beginning.

So, I’m looking for originality, and whilst I’m looking for it, I’m also engorging on the good old classics. I’m going to reread Das Parfuem by Patrick Sueskind. I read the novel ages ago, when I was still a student, and I know it impressed me a lot, and I’d love to read it again before I watch the screen adaptation by Tom Tykwer. I have to say, few adaptations impressed me in the past, the most disappointing being One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Milos Forman. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange also wasn’t particularly pleasing.

I guess it has to do with how we read books. Speaking of A Clockwork Orange (which deserves a different chapter altogether), for me the most important part in the book is when Alex leaves prison. Everything before the book’s final is important, of course, but Alex’s rampages and his time in prison are not what the book is about. It is about human violence, insincerity and indifference, which start in the family and society and the physical expression of which is only the tip of the iceberg. Burgess’s novel (like all good works of literature) depicts – sometimes in a very detailed and painful way – the tip, but the base of the iceberg is always to be found by the reader, providing s/he is attentive to the hints and keys scattered by the author throughout the book.

So, I’m going to reread Das Parfuem, I’m reading the new book by Eco, and I’ll be reading Murakami. And I’ll also be keeping my fingers crossed for Mario Vargas Llosa who, as some tabloids have reported, is in the long list for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I’ll be way over the Moon (and over Aisa Tanaf, perhaps), if he wins it.

Also, this Sunday I’ve been to my first rugby match at the Halliwell Jones Stadium in Warrington. I’ve seen lots of rugby on TV since 2003, but I’ve never been to the rugby stadium before this Sunday. Both teams for which I was supposed to cheer (one of them was a local team, Swinton Lions) lost, and I left half-deaf, without finishing watching the second game. Well, hopefully next time it’ll be better. In the meantime I’m following the football leagues and championships – sporadically, when I decide that the only thing I want to do in my free time is to knit and to listen to the TV.

Berkeley University Video Lectures and Courses

From now on, if you’re lazy or too busy with work but still want to further your education, you can do so with the help of the ever mighty Google. The Berkeley University in California has started broadcasting their lectures online at http://video.google.com/ucberkeley.html

For myself, I’ve already noted two lectures that I’ll listen to as soon as I have time (I’m not lazy, but I’m busy):

David Lynch: Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain

Modern Literary Manuscripts

Links:

The regular broadcast of the Berkeley University lectures can be found at http://webcast.berkeley.edu.
One of the lectures that may be interesting enough is introduced in this post – How Wicked Is Wiki?

You Are What You…

[This post is dedicated to the playwright from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, who was gifted, but liked listening to The Monkees’ I’m a Believer].

Listen

Psychologists have found out that the music young people listen to can tell (almost exactly) who they are. In simple terms, if you’re a jazz aficionado, you’re probably a very brainy person. If you like pop, you don’t like overcomplicating things. If you like dance or soul, your tongue is likely to be your enemy. If, however, you’re a fan of gangsta rap, it’s very possible that you’re timid by nature.

Music, claims an article by Lane Jennings in The Futurist (vol. 39, 2005), is forming the communities, and portals like Last.fm and, of course, My Space, certainly prove the point. But, personally, I have reservations about the idea that it is iPods and iTunes that are causing this change. Rather, they ferment or even bring to the surface the long-existing tendency. And we’ve become more aware of it because fans don’t have to travel miles to the annual meeting of Ella Fitzgerald or ABBA fan clubs – they can simply meet online as often as they like.

To test the findings, follow this link, to listen to The Wicked and Unfaithful Song of Marcel Duchamp to His Queen. The text of the poem was written by Paul Carroll, and was put to music by John Austin. Feel free to tell us what it made you discover about yourself.

[In case if the link doesn’t work, please go to www.toutfait.com, to ‘Music’ folder, and look for ‘The Wicked and Unfaithful Song…’ in the list of works. I do hope, however, that the above link will take you there directly].

Eat
Another researcher’s findings (in the article by Kathy Lane in The Mail on Sunday, April 2004) have revealed that in England your eating habits stand for your social status. Apparently, if you’re an upper-middle-class person you won’t be seen dead eating bacon and chip butties, prawn cocktail with Marie-Rose sauce, or rice salads with sweetcorn – typically working-class or lower-middle-class foods. [Strictly speaking, you may indulge in any of these, but only if you’re socially secure enough to be eccentric].

Then, of course, we can bring the whole bunch of food advice in the picture, and it will turn out that the lower classes shop for ready-made foods in cheap supermarkets, while the upper branches shop for organic and ‘healthy’ foods in more expensive stores, or even have their friendly butcher and greengrocer.

It all looks kind of funny and superficial if we take this simply as the reflection of class differences in food consumption. However, I was astounded to read a booklet containing advice on healthy eating for those who suffer from MS (multiple sclerosis). This is the list of products they were not supposed to have: lard, butter, cream of soups, caffein, and – most importantly – fish in batter and chips.

Why ‘most importantly’? Because all of us who’ve been to England at least once already know that fish in batter and chips are one of the favourite English meals, especially in the North. As a matter of fact, the statistics show that the Northerners are more often affected by MS that the Southerners. I asked a representative of one MS Care Centre in South Manchester, if the food guidelines for the MS sufferers can also be used as general guidelines for MS prevention. His answer was ‘yes’. ‘Then doesn’t it look like’, I asked, ‘that the favourite Northern food may also be the cause of MS?’ I would like to be wrong, but I felt that his ‘yes’ to my question contained a lot of astonishment.

So, eating habits evidently define much more than just your social status, which sounds quite commonsensical, and is exactly what Jamie Oliver has been uttering for a long while. Perhaps, then, it is time to do something about it?

Say

What you say and how you say it is also manifestant of your class background. Two years ago I was returning to Manchester from my research spell in London. It was an evening train, and in the carriage there was this group of young office workers, two men and two women. They were talking loudly, and eventually I heard one man, speaking in RP [Received Pronunciation, also known as the Queen’s English], explaining to a woman, how he could tell her social background. She referred to her father as ‘Dad’, which gave away her not-so-high social status. If she was posh, he explained, she’d call her parent ‘Father’.

Read

Until now we may be thinking that everything that is written here may or may not be true. In the end of the day, the egalitarians will say that people must not be judged by the music they listen or by the words they use in their speech. On the other hand, all people like coming together in groups, and the entering criteria must be defined. So, whether one likes this or not, if there are people who want to be ‘upper-middle-class’, there will always be those who don’t fall into the category.

However, reading habits is my most favourite example of how little reading tells about who you are. To define people by their bookshelf is totally futile, because they may be buying books simply to decorate the room or to impress the visitors. Such thing as the entire edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica standing in the most prominent place in someone’s study never means that the owner has actually read it.

Then there are people who read Dan Brown and Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the same degree of pleasure. There are also people who we’d assume are very cultivated because they listen to Antonio Caldara (an Italian Baroque composer) and read Martin Heidegger. I’d imagine that reading Heidegger’s musings on language would at least make one more attentive and sensitive to their own speech. And yet, I’ve been proved wrong.

I read the news today, oh boy…

Perhaps unwittingly, today’s Metro (www.metro.co.uk) was full of offbeat stories. This is just a short sample of what was intended to attract today’s readers’ attention (among other stories, of course).

11 schools shut on the eve of Robbie Williams’s concert, to avoid problems. One parent, however, was not amused: ‘Everybody is back at school,… and they have closed already’.

A student, who was secretly filming his fellow female students taking a bath, initially tried to hide a digital camera in a shower gel bottle but didn’t manage to record clear footage. I wonder, why…

A new drug that was developed to treat premature ejaculation comes with side-effects: nausea, diarrhoea, headache and dizziness.

In the States, three men, aged 20, drove 50 miles to dig out a corpse of a girl, to have an intercourse with it. They’ve never known the young woman, but saw her photo on the obituaries page in a newspaper. All three face more than 5 years in prison.

You thought that Mona Lisa could only be used in one way – as an object of inspiration that hangs under the glass in the Louvre? Pas du tout. It can also be used as a Hallowe’en mask, and this newly discovered facet has just been presented at the Tokyo International Gift Show. If you’re tired of goth damsels and Freedy Krugers swarming at your Hallowe’en’s party, spice it up with a bit of true Beauty. Worry not: you’ll look as fearful, as the occasion demands. This latex Gioconda’s beauty is indeed a dreaful force.

In Paris, Societe Generale [apologies, I cannot insert accents] celebrated the opening of the Rugby World Cup by having the acrobats stage a vertical rugby match on the Societe’s facade. I wish I could see it.

A bull attempted to cross the river to reach a herd of cows on the opposite bank. Unfortunately, he got stuck in the mud and had to be rescued by the fire brigade and a tractor.

Finally, the paper contained a plenty of advice to the couple who suffer from their over-amorous and loud neighbours. Someone suggested to play Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus at the peak of the neighbours’ passion (and claimed it had worked).

I tried to do a similar thing several years ago, in Moscow. My neighbour upstairs was a convinced DIY-er. He DIYed everything in his flat, from furniture to cars and motorbikes. Some outcomes were freakish. His passion for fish-breeding, for instance, culminated in dropping of a 20-litre fish tank, filled with water (without fish, thankfully). I was told there had been torrential rain in my parents’ corridor.

Naturally, my parents tried to influence him in one way or another, but nothing would stop this Jack-of-all-trades. As I grew older and began to listen to a lot of music, this man’s domestic pursuits started ennerving me. His drilling and hammering was way too loud, and I literally couldn’t hear my music. I decided I’d use shock therapy. I had a record of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which score, as you know, contains the sounds of cannon fire. One day, when my neighbour had once again passionately embraced his electric drill, I forwarded the record to the exact point of cannon fire, and played it on full volume.

This was the only time I played any record on full volume. Believe it or not, the drilling became less loud. Or maybe I just deafened myself shortly. At any rate, this did not avert my neighbour from DIYing, and he continues to drill and hammer until this day.

This is one of the few occasions when I can (otherwise being an apartment partisan) wholeheartedly agree that having your own house has its benefits. On the other hand, having neighbours is very beneficial for one’s life experience.

My Fair Cabbage

Reuters reported on a new film dedicated to the British royal family, The Queen, directed by Stephen Frears and starring Dame Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II. The film has just been screened at the Venice Film Festival and is based on extensive research, resulting in what is described as ‘a realistic dramatisation’.

The realism goes along with a plenty of humour, the report says, ‘particularly when dramatising scenes of intimacy between the queen, Prince Philip, Charles and her mother.

“Move over, cabbage,” Philip says as the couple go to bed, and the queen dons a woolly dressing gown and clutches a hot water bottle on the night Diana is killed‘. (Reuters 2 September 2006).

It is, of course, very funny to have Her Majesty being called a “cabbage”. However, this is exactly what the French call their beloved. ‘Mon petit chou’ (my little cabbage) is a famous French expression of love and affection. The English equivalents to this lovely French phrase are hopelessly simple – “sweetheart”, “sweetie”, or “honey”.

In the context of the film, what may have been intended to look like an odd sign of affection is actually a literal translation into English of the French idiom. So, Prince Philip does in fact speak the language of love – however funny it may sound.

She Came in with a Tray of Tea Cups… on Her Head

The story arrived today to all of us who are subscribers to the BBC Newsnight and Panorama newsletters. While the Health Minister was interviewed in one of the BBC’s newsrooms, a lady walked past her in the background, carrying a tray full of teas on her head. Peter Barron, the editor of Newsnight, tells us that the lady in question is Nana Amoatin, originally from Ghana, and she’s been getting the teas in like this for years. As she put it, ‘anyone can do it’.

Indeed, I tried to do this is my childhood, when I was myself fascinated with this practice of carrying things on the head. I wouldn’t dare try to carry anything like tea cups, so I limited myself down to books, and I think I managed to make a few steps with a couple of thick volumes on my crown. I also think I began to lose balance, so I stopped, since books were even more precious to me, than tea cups. Either way I didn’t learn to carry things on my head then, but I’m thinking I might need to learn now. Quite frankly, it would help.

The Excommunication of Pluto the Planet

The planet Pluto has been relegated from the Big Planets. What this “excommunication” brings to people and astrologers?

pluto-relegated-from-planets
Pluto is relegated from the Big Planets (Image credit: yahoo.com)
So, the planet Pluto has been disqualified (relegated) from the Planet Division and will now continue to whirl as a dwarf planet. The story is here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5282440.stm. Apparently, the possibility has been discussed for a while, and now the action was finally taken.

I’m wondering how this is going to impact the work of astrologers. From what I could gather in the past, while surfing through various resources on the web, there is already a contention, as to whether to take into account the positions of asteroids in a horoscope or not (think of Lilith and Selena, first and foremost). With Pluto now being ‘diminished’ to the status of a dwarf planet, it’s interesting how this is going to be taken into account, if at all?

In simple terms, Pluto is associated with dramatic changes, and since the planet was given the name of the Roman god of the Inferno, it rules the 8th house – the so-called house of death – and is linked to the sign of Scorpio. It ‘rules’ crimes, revolutions, terrorism, but also the reproductive forces (cue in a connection between Eros and Tanathos).

Although the astronomers’ decision is purely scientific, it is quite curious in one respect. If one thinks of death, revolutionary events, or even terrorism, they are all of the size and influence of Pluto.  They are small, lurking from beneath the most common occasions, easy to go unnoticed, existing on the fringe of the system (be it solar or social). Yet they are powerful enough to overthrow empires and wage wars, as well as to push people towards the goals they wish to pursue (memento mori, perhaps?) In such context the planet Pluto being relegated appears almost like a manifestation of its usually huge impact, as much as of its marginal status.

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