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2003-07-18 17:00 (UTC+1)
Collecting up book recommendations and recommenders, some of which
have been hanging around the guestbook for a long time, we have:
- Sommarboken, av Tove Jansson [Grauniad + Fiona]
- La Pens�e sauvage - the new hors-serie on L�vi-Strauss from
the 'Vlobs, which looks to be excellent. Presse de France will sort
you out with one. [Des]
- Popul�rmusik fr�n Vittula av Mikael Niemi [Birgitte]
- Novels, various av P�r Lagerkvist [Simon]
- Poetry, av Nils Ferlin [Simon]
- Works, various, av G�ran Tunstr�m [Simon]
- R�de Orm [Des]
- The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear, by Walter Moers [Dominic]
- Otto er et n�sehorn af Ole Lund Kirkegaard [Maus]
- Fakta om Finland, L, and especially Naiv
super, av Erlend Loe [Anna K]
It looks a bit daunting, really, all stacked up like that, but it's
for archival purposes as much as anything.
(We've been having computer troubles, here, yes.)
[Permalink]
2003-07-18 10:14 (UTC+1)
Mel Gibson has now completed production of his film of the last hours
of Mr Christ's life, but no distributors have yet signed up. For some
reason:
"The passion" har varit kontroversiell �nda sedan inspelningsstart.
Sk�despelarna pratar arameiska och Gibson t�nker inte texta filmen.
- Jag tror �nd� att tittarna f�rst�r vad som h�nder, har han sagt.
["The Passion" has been controversial the whole time since production
started. The actors speak Aramaic and Gibson doesn't intend to
subtitle the film.
"I think that viewers will still understand what's going on," he has
said.]
Oh, and you will doubtless be relieved to hear the crucifixion scenes
are said to be impeccably grim and bloody. Frankly this looks to be
the most pointless exercise in vanity film-making since the last time
someone was foolish enough to give Woody Allen any money. (Mr Gibson
is spending his own money because as a devout Catholic he has been
unable to fritter it away on drugs, gambling and divorce
settlements like proper movie stars do. Let this be a lesson to you
all, persons!)
[Permalink]
2003-07-17 15:55 (UTC+1)
Sono venuto col tram. Ritorner� a piedi.
I am engaged at present in working through a course in German for
persons concerned to acquire a reading knowledge of that language in
the minimum possible time, which is organised largely around syntax.
I calculate that I'll have German pretty much sorted out by September,
though, and I have been wondering whether Spanish or Italian should
come next.
Mr Oxfam, though, has steered me firmly towards Italian, by providing
for me the Harrap's Blingual Series course in the language from 1924.
It has a grammatical sketch, followed by a collection of short
passages in Italian, almost all of which are then followed by a
phonetic IPA transcription and then an Engleesh translation.
From the introduction:
The learner is asked not to take fright at the figured pronunciation
or "phonetic transcript." It is essential, even though a mere reading
knowledge be aimed at, that the "mental audition" of a foreign
language be fairly correct, if something of its spirit is to be
assimilated.
And later:
The skeleton grammar which precedes the readings should be used at
first for reference only. Most students make the mistake of starting
a language by reading the grammar instead of reading texts. Each of
the latter should be gone over several times, preferably aloud, and
thoroughly mastered.
This is pretty much exactly how I think language courses should be
designed, but does it actually work in practice? I can hardly wait to
find out.
Admittedly, Italian isn't all that hard to pronounce even from the raw
orthography, but there are some phonetic wrinkles - there are two flavours
of "o" and "e", for example, and the accents aren't completely
predictable.
And the texts, Varied Reader, the texts! A snippet must, but cannot,
suffice:
Noi intanto avevamofatto conoscenza, e contratto �bbligo di ballare
insieme per tutta la sera coll' �ltime venute.
Meantime we had become acquainted, and put ourselves under the
obligation to dance all the evening with the last comers.
[XXXVII: Un ballo villereccio / A country ball]
Roll on September, say I!
[Permalink]
2003-07-17 10:17 (UTC+1)
Fiona is off to G�teborg any minute now, but
many of the French books she was obliged to read by her university are
now starting a new life with me, hurrah. When the day comes that I am
overwhelmed by a sudden desire to read Zola's Germinale - and
experts warn that this can happen any time - it will find me well
equipped for the task.
More excitingly, perhaps, I also now have a Point de Vue summer
special, with a questionnaire to determine with an unprecedented
degree of scientific rigour the extent to which one has the prinsess
nature. (I had some trouble understanding the questions, sadly, and
not particularly because they were in French at that, but I will keep
you informed.)
[Permalink]
2003-07-16 17:10
Nipping out for coffee in the relative coolth of today, I popped also
into the Oxfam bookshop (they really didn't ought to leave it lying
around like that, it's a menace) and they had a petit Robert
for 9.99 UKP whereas they're over fifty quid new.
So I now have one new Engleesh pence (which would be 2.4 of the 1936
flavour of pences) to spend on my excursions to Sweden, even before
visiting the lovely Georgian spa town of Bath to meet the imminently
avresande Global Nomad, Fiona, and I shouldn't be at all
surprised if I felt inclined to spend a ha'penny or even more on a
refreshing draught of ale at some point in the evening.
If I save and save, maybe I'll have some spare cash for the sn�kaos
season - all these heatwaves (v�rmeb�ljor) aren't very Scandewegian
anyway, is it?
[Permalink]
2003-07-16 14:11 (UTC+1)
While we wait for the England vs. South Africa Test series to begin,
what more productive use of our time could there be than to read about
the Japanese women's cricket team, shortly to make its first
appearance in Europe, hurrah!
According to their (Australian) coach, Stephen Field, they could do
with loosening
up a little:
"They'll spend hours and hours trying to develop a particular
technique - they need to follow their instincts a little more.
"We've been working on their running between wickets and playing a few
more cross-bat shots. They tend to play nice straight bat shots
through mid-on and mid-off but need to exploit the whole area of the
ground."
Good grief. I can just imagine Ema Kuribayashi (for it is she!)
diligently practicing the hoik over mid on and the thick edge down to
third man from a mistimed cover drive for hours in the nets, now.
("Oh how I wish I could gift my wicket wafting uselessly to a ball too
far outside off-stump with no foot movement like Solanki-san!")
You don't see a lot of wimmins's cricket on the telly,
especially if you don't actually have a telly, but I quite liked it
when I did see some years ago. That was during the era when the
Canonical Cricket Contest was beefy blokes (such as Lamb and Smith for
England) wielding their bats like clubs while fast bowlers (such as
Ambrose and Walsh for the West Indies) tried to knock their heads off
with the ball. The wimmins's game was a refreshing contest between
straight-batted pushes straight out of the MCC manual and bowlers
(even spin bowlers, which were quite rare in the men's game pre-Warne)
relying on guile rather than just pace.
It's in the Netherlands, incidentally, if you happen to be in the
neighbourhood.
[Permalink]
2003-07-16 10:24 (UTC+1)
The BBC is all what's with all this scorchio?
Forecasters predict this will be the warmest summer since 1995, which
was the best for 50 years bar the heat wave of 1976. Last month the UK
basked in one of the hottest Junes on record, and July looks set to be
record breaker.
Persons in my world are divided into two groups: those which remember
the heat wave of 1976 - which group includes me, although I was but a
five-year old - and those which do not - which group includes pretty
much all persons of a youthfuller persuasion than myself.
In the summer of '95 I was commuting several miles by bike to a
R&D facility in the grounds of a tobacco factory as part of my MSc
placement (there were persons who expressed an "ethical" preference
for working for baby-killing military establishments instead, but not
me. Besides, in those days I still smoked.) When I got there the
aircon was a significant relief for a while until it started to feel
to cold; when I got back homeI could wring my shirt out, for sure.
And this year is hotter than that, in my considered opinion.
[Permalink]
2003-07-15 15:02
The snarter this un-British frazzleiciousness packs its bags and
heads back to Shanghai the better pleased I'll be, frankly. I am a
Fairly Northern Yoorpean, and I do not thrive in the heat.
Still, with whom better to pine for Frozen Wastelands than Tove
Jansson, celebrated the world over for her Moominsagas, and also
celebrated this week in
the Grauniad for her grown-up novel The Summer Book about a
child and its grandparent on an island for the summer:
The child is intransigent; the old woman is always on the cusp of
tiredness, constantly dizzy, fearful of losing her balance in a
landscape where "the balance between survival and extinction was so
delicate that even the smallest change was unthinkable". The threat of
brevity, even on this timeless island in this timeless, gorgeous
summer, is very marked. But Jansson's brilliance is to create a
narrative that seems, at least, to have no forward motion, to exist in
lit moments, gleaming dark moments, like lights on a string, each
chapter its own beautifully constructed, random-seeming, complete
story. Her writing is all magical deception, her sentences simple and
loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing,
suddenly, the depth. As Philip Pullman so succinctly puts it, Tove
Jansson was a genius.
Sommarboken, consider yourself added to my reading list.
[Permalink]
2003-07-15 10:13
Vickan's partyfotos. This would be the TV-spectacular party to
which everyone in the whole world was invited except her special
friend Daniel, who the King (who is Vickan's daddy) said couldn't
come.
[Permalink]
2003-07-14 14:22 (UTC+1)
Once upon a time there was a beautiful prinsess and it was her
birthday and she said to her daddy (who was the King!) I would like to
go on a boat and it is my birthday and her daddy (who was the
King!) said "OK, I'll drive," and they went all around the harbour!
And she took some friends too, and her special friend Daniel who
wasn't a prins but was really very nice anyway, and the newspapers
wrote
all
about it.
Happy birthday, Vickan!
[Permalink]
2003-07-14 11:05 (UTC+1)
Hoegaarden and Bass, Canary Wharf and Greenwich park and the
Observatory; standing on the Actual Meridian ("It's now
now!" "No, it's BST at the moment." "It's exactly
an hour to now!") and synchronising watches.
Walking to North Greenwich, the building site which includes the
defunct Millenium Dome (behold the North Korean splendour of its
monumental but largely abandoned tube station!), the path meandering
erratically through building sites and past inexplicable "public
spaces" but always along the south bank of the river, facing
uncountable grim developments of lavishly-priced yuppie hutches.
Along the London skyline skyscrapers mingle with the Monument, St
Paul's, the Tower as a welcome reminder that it was all new when it
was built. (The past is a marvellous place to visit, but I wouldn't
want to live there.)
More Bass, hoorah, and a return visit to an improved fish restaurant serving only
the sustainablest Icelandic cods, yum yum.
And, of course, fixing Outlook Express; turning the outside table to
allow creosoting underneath; boggling that England won the
cricket (and how!); perusing brochures for the Hurtigrute (my
mum's going back even if I'm not, yet); wilting in the heat; being let
down by the bloody Tube.
London is inexhaustible but I'm not, and neither are weekends, h�las.
[Permalink]
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