Tasty sin!

Today I transcribed enough of the Neverending (Because Victorian) Roland Novel to feel satisfied; watched an amazing war movie; bought gorgeous books I cannot afford; talked over the phone with two brilliantly fun friends from back East; and drank a frappuccino, which is sending shivers all through me right now: oh, corporate Americana! In addition, I got out of the house—!

Hm, this’ll probably get long. I’ll break it up into several posts. Since the sort order is by most recent post, this little blurb will reside at the “top” of the few that follow.

Roland Oliver and more about my work.

The Roland novel is Roland Oliver, by JUSTIN McCARTHY, M.P., author of “Dear Lady Disdain,” “A Fair Saxon,” “Maid of Athens,” “Carniola,” etc. Written in… [mumble] I don’t know when, the pages themselves don’t print the year. I’ll have to rummage about in notes and/or library catalogues for it. (It may be in the notebook I lost some months ago — I’m not actually sure which pieces of information were stored in that notebook. Isn’t it great? Research with variables. I may have the information, or I may not. If I ever did write it down, it may or may not still be in my possession.)
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Cranes Flying

The war movie is a 1957 film by… shame on me for having already forgotten his name. It’s called Cranes Flying (? - Letiat Zhuravli in Russian), and is about the second world war. It won all kinds of awards all over the world when it came out, including Cannes, Vienna I think, Canada, USA — was relatively well-known in the West.
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In with the herd, and other politics.

Around midnight tonight, I drove to a local Barnes & Noble for the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. When else was I going to be around Southern California, which most of me detests, surrounded by people to whom I mostly cannot relate, participating in a real American fan frenzy? This had to be witnessed.
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Pole Chudes

Then there are good days. Today, Grandma and I started up a new activity: I read Russian classics to her. This benefits both of us, as I’ve been meaning to read more of these but haven’t had time. On her part, Grandma seems to be happier and doesn’t call us over to her room quite as often as usual. At least, that was the case today; we’ll see how long it lasts. Today’s reading was a short story by Chekhov and some poems by Pasternak at bedtime. Can’t say I’m complaining; besides being generally pleasurable, this also trains me to speak for long periods of time. Since I’m planning to conduct a few sessions of my humanities computing course as more or less lectures, this is great practice.

We had her a foot bath; we ate tasty food; she even let me work for over an hour with surprisingly few interruptions. (Today my imaginary monkey and I learned about lists and arrays in Perl.) Mom was relaxed when she came home from work, we ate more good food and watched Russian TV. Usually I tolerate it and/or try to tune it out (hm, funny; I’ve been reading DeLillo’s White Noise lately). Today, however, I enjoyed watching not only a film based on Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, but also – to my surprise – a game show.

I don’t know, does Disney’s Pinocchio have the Field of Miracles in it? In the Italian original, as in the Russian version named Burattino [”puppet” in Italian], Pinocchio meets a deceitful Fox and Cat, who tell him about the Field of Miracles, located in the Land of Fools. You bury your money there and pour some water over, and overnight it grows into a biiig tree full of money! Then you’re rich and can buy Geppetto (or Papa Carlo) that new jacket and all.

Well. Pole Chudes is the name of the Russian take on The Wheel of Fortune – with four important exceptions. First, everyone gets a participation prize. Three-times-three people play in each half-hour show, and they all get the same prize, although the prize changes show to show. They’re all practical prizes: microwaves, vacuum cleaners, what-not. Second, this must be a tradition that has evolved over the show’s near-decade-long run so far: the participants bring gifts to the charming host. Gift-giving has taken on a life of its own; sometimes a whole town or village (if it’s small enough) from which the participant hails participates in the gift. For example, some of the gifts brought out today were:

- two live rabbits and some Armenian cognac;
- a drop of crude oil encased in glass, from a town near the Baikal;
- homemade Ukrainian vodka-like drink;
- children’s drawings of Moscow done specifically for the occasion;
- a full assortment of non-perishable products from a dairy factory, including powdered soy milk;
- homemade smetana (thick Russian sour cream, tasty stuff, and homemade it is well loved) – this was specifically for the beautiful helper girls on the show, as they were proclaimed too thin;
- a beautifully-done icon of some saint or other;
- and a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember now.

The host cracks jokes, lewd to a greater or lesser degree, and never lewd with children. That’s the third thing: many people, participants and audience members alike, bring along children, who announce commercial breaks. The fourth and final difference is that this isn’t really about money so much as it is about prizes and banter. The puzzles are all single words, never phrases; and the clues given to them are not, say, “thing” or “sport” but rather interesting trivia questions. For each show, there is a theme to the questions; today’s was symbology. (Is this the right word?) For example: what did the walnut mean in ancient Greece? What was the meaning of this other particular nut (I think it was hazelnut) for the ancient Germanic peoples? What does the almond tree symbolize most often all over the world? Finding out the answers is left as an exercise for the curious reader.

All of these particulars make the show homey, interesting. Nobody seems to care how much money they’ve won, it’s not about that. Fun stuff.

I’ve got to write about work sometime!

In the midst of eventful family life, I’ve been transcribing (”We in humanities computing call it digitizing, honey”) Roland works, so that I can work on the corpus come fall. Enfance de Roland / Jung Roland is a nineteenth-century French opera, written both in French and in German, which tells of his youth (if you haven’t figured it out from the title). What a young gentleman, I’ll tell you. Loves his mother more than life itself, cares only about returning her to honor after she’s been exiled by her brother King Charlemagne. Roland isn’t Charlemagne’s child of incest in this one, his daddy’s Milon, but he isn’t around. Roland undertakes battle with a giant so that he might help a friend procure a magic sword and win the hand of Charlemagne’s daughter – you follow me so far?

Here’s the kicker. The friend, the sworn blood-brother? He’s Pagan. Sigmar is a godless heathen! Granted, he converts to Christianity at the end, but that’s not the point. Roland the Christian hero, right hand to Roman Emperor Charlemagne, Roland who in the Song of Roland proclaims that “Christians are right and Pagans are wrong,” and who smites the Saracen enemies without mercy, in his childhood is made out to befriend a Pagan. I love this.

The other work-related thing is perl. Perl is great!, which should indicate to you that I’m still at the very beginning and haven’t run into real problems yet. But, really: I am bad at logic and associations, and perl is making sense. Of course, the Llama Book (Learning Perl, O’Reilly series) deserves a lot of credit for that. Best-written manual I’ve purchased in years.

Speaking of purchasing manuals, Hahn & Harley’s The Unix Companion is on its way to me. Used, but cheap, and otherwise out of print. Seems to be pretty easy to get used, though, and it comes highly recommended. For a tome of several hundred pages, it is remarkably clear and easy to use. Erm, if you are like me and actually need a unix reference book.

18jun03

My poor mother. She’s done this, alone, while working full-time and drastically undersleeping, for months.

I hold on to my own mental faculties as I watch my grandmother’s degrade.

Yesterday Mom lent me a book about Chernivtsi, the little Jewish village in the Ukraine where my father grew up. There’s a lot written in it about the Zafrin family, and about him too; I haven’t read much of it yet, but it got me thinking about history and continuity and family. Because, obvoiusly, I haven’t been thinking enough about family here in California, this world that seems so separate from the one in which I usually live and work.

It does not matter what you are doing now. No matter how physically and intellectually active you are, there is a chance that you’ll need taking care of too. I know most of us are dimly aware of this; but it needs to be viscerally felt at least once.

She used to be a teacher in secondary school, and then for years a history professor in university. Her ex-pupils visited her, I think, up until she left Moldova. My childhood’s most vivid image of her is bespectacled, reading the newspaper by the living room table. Or doing crosswords, she loved crosswords.

We played Battleship on paper. She loved cooking, loved it. Spent her life in the kitchen – when she wasn’t reading the paper or watching the evening news. Or reading literature; although my grandfather read more literature than she did, or perhaps I’m misremembering. Anyway, cooking. Yellow string beans fried up (”sautéed” doesn’t quite suit her kitchen) in butter. Perfectly clear beautiful broth. Open-face melty-cheese sandwiches made in the Miracle Oven as a special treat some suppers. Cheese wafers, we got to make them in her ultra-cool wafer maker that nobody else had. Tea, with lemon and jam, in the evenings. While watching the evening news.

She’d make compotes out of plums and rosehips and cherries. Do you call them compotes in English? Simmer the fruit with some sugar for a bit, then cool and refrigerate. Tasty summer drink.

She smoked a pack a day, out on the balcony when it was warm, on the stair landing when it wasn’t. She hasn’t smoked for something like seven years now, which really isn’t a lot, considering she’s 87. For whatever reason, I always tolerated her smoking more easily than I did my father’s.

She used to be nice and plump, when she got on in years: she’d never been particularly slim. You should see her portrait, gorgeous beret-ed eighteen-year-old with black black eyebrows and round face looking straight at the camera.

California ain’t N’awlins, I can tell you that.

Whatever time I take for myself, here in California, comes directly out of the time available for [academic] work, or for regrouping my forces and preparing for the next day. Nevertheless, distracting myself from family life with unrelated activities (such as writing) seems to ground me. I’ll try to write often. Every day. We all know how such intentions work out.

I tried to write chronologically, but there’s just too much. So I’ll post entries as things occur to me. Road trip interspersed in other.

For the record, I think every human before the age of, say, 35 should spend some time caring for an elderly person, or anyone unable to fully care for themselves. It really does provide a different perspective. In the last week, my thoughts have turned to: death and dying; mental degradation with age; why exactly it is that one’s sense of shame persists more strongly than other mental faculties; the importance of a living will (please, someone put me to sleep if I’m ever struck with irreversible illness); a [re]new[ed] appreciation for nurses…
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Trackback

I know, so much news to write up, and all I want to do is post a link?? How lame. Well, it’ll have to do for now: I’d like to come back to this when planning my syllabus for next spring. Though I’m writing, really.

Any blogging and personal e-mailing is done at the direct expense of work time, which is scarce as it is. Nevertheless, I look forward to the distractions: they give perspective to these otherwise turbulent days.

Yesterday

Brainstorm, word game, internet cafe with expensive pricing…

Yield on the interstate, eventually, when Louisiana cars politely keep their distance until you can fuckin’ free up the passing lane already. Drenched down to the essence, linger not in the hotell room, escaping into the nighttime streets. Bouncers full of vigor to allow no-cover access to Toulouse St. bars with overpriced onion rings. Slapstick blooze wench transports you back into the northeast, with Tracy Chapman covers. Her little orchestra is so chill, you forget your road-rage.

Me, I will wake tomorrow to find opalescent sky and restrained registration desk clerk endearing himself to me with.

No decisions before chickory coffee, our noggins soaked in the torque of humidity. Intending to take in all aspects of N’awlins life, we entertain our ignoble, transparent minds by paying religious attention to caffeine intake and investigating the possibility of a nap. Deliberately avoiding enamelled, saccharine tourist-trap taverns, intense in our lack of nativity to this town, we anticipate the totality of this idiosyncratic, ominous negation of access to lucid archives of memory’s bias. Anarchy masters all, in New Orleans. Yet we yawn, writing this epic travelogue.

Mark and the ELit, or: Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Sounds like a good title for a children’s book, no?

I write the following as a person only marginally related to what they call electronic literature. But, hey, electronic writers and electronic scholars are finally coming together in significant ways, so I write down some thoughts on a conflict.

Mark Bernstein recently resigned from the Electronic Literature Organization. ELO’s president Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink wrote an open letter to Mark in response.

Wow, the political strife. From a deeply subjective perspective, I found Mark’s letter too vague and… impolite? bitter? spatteringly spiteful? The ELO letter I found, if nothing else, rather more precise, speaking to specific issues and fully acknowledging the significant contributions Mark has made to the electronic literature field.

Part of me refuses to take an unequivocal side, though my doing or not doing so would not matter to anyone actually involved in the conflict or in ELO’s work. Besides, I am certain that my impressions have been influenced to some extent by the several friends and acquaintances I have who are active in ELO. But the whole thing strikes me as wholly unnecessary and generative of more spite than absolutely necessary. It’s been clear to me that ELO and Mark Bernstein have had different ideas about promoting electronic literature, but to promote one side by stating that the other is an active hindrance does nobody any good. People will continue to participate in ELO, and they (or other people) will continue to attend eNarrative roundtables. (That I won’t go to any more eNarratives is a matter of finances; the first two were actually quite enjoyable.) But ideology is a funny thing, prone to being expressed to the exclusion of opposing ideas. Only time will show whose approach to the promotion of electronic literature is the better one; this is true regardless of whether venomous remarks are made in the meantime. Me, I’ll balk at the staggering price of a recent Eastgate publication and hope to take a look at it sometime without breaking my graduate-student’s bank account.