What are you currently reading? (part 2)

[vijayjohn]

Managed to review the first 52 quatrains but am still not sure whether I can recite them all in one shot

[Yasna]

What she does very well is satirising a certain kind of insufferable East Coast liberal who clings to their supposed cosmopolitanism as something which makes them superior to average Americans.

What?! You mean we're not more cultured and civilized than all you backwater Americans?


I finished 猟銃・闘牛, which contained three very solid novellas, the two eponymous ones and 比良のシャクナゲ (The Azaleas of Hira). The latter is a devastating portrayal of an obsessed anthropologist's descent into cynicism towards his family, his students, and his country. He even whinges about his children's poor German (one son studied it forever but hardly remembers a thing, and another majored in it but only reads Goethe), because it means they won't be able to read his magnum opus. Can't wait to read more by Inoue.

Yesterday I read Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll, which was interesting but limited in scope. I'm currently reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

[vijayjohn]

The latter is a devastating portrayal of an obsessed anthropologist's descent into cynicism towards his family, his students, and his country. He even whinges about his children's poor German (one son studied it forever but hardly remembers a thing, and another majored in it but only reads Goethe), because it means they won't be able to read his magnum opus.

He wrote his magnum opus in German? Was he a native speaker of it, or did he have some other reason for doing that? Was it common for people in Japan to study German at the time?

[Yasna]

He wrote his magnum opus in German?

Yes.

Was he a native speaker of it, or did he have some other reason for doing that? Was it common for people in Japan to study German at the time?

German was the most important language for science in Japan (and other places) in the late 19th and early 20th century.

[vijayjohn]

I just read quatrains 53 and 54 of Mayura Sandesham to my dad. Quatrain #53 is ambiguous but is just one of several couplets so far where the author urges the peacock he's talking to starting in quatrain #6 (Mayura Sandesham means 'the peacock's message') to kill snakes, partly because he says snakes are peacocks' worst enemies and partly as a way of criticizing the king who exiled him at the beginning of the poem. It's another one of those quatrains with a lot of obscure Sanskrit words in it.

[linguoboy]

Finished the Shriver. There's a good payoff which justifies some of the apparent flaws I was complaining about earlier. Not a great novel, but I don't regret reading it.

Gilead is finally starting to hit its stride; whoever told me that happens about 100 pages in was pretty near the mark. It doesn't have a plot as such, so it has to spend a fair amount of time developing its themes and characters in order to get the reader invested. It also helps that there's finally an overt conflict in the story. All in all, the second half should go much quicker than the first.

The last Bärentreff made me feel bad for not reading any German so I looked at what was lying around and decided to start Böll's Gruppenbild mit Dame. I picked up the book because I have pleasant memories of reading his short stories in college, particularly the office satire "Es wird etwas geschehen". I guess you could call it postmodern in construction, as it purports to tell the life story of a fictitious middle-aged woman in Berlin on the basis of interviews with neighbours and friends and various documents, some of which are invented and some of which are genuine. It's a fat four hundred pages, so I may not get through it all, but so far I'm enjoying the prose. Böll writes terrific Schachtelsätze--not as convoluted as Mann's, so while they do take some effort to puzzle out, it doesn't feel like too much effort for the payoff. Plus he makes me laugh a lot more than Mann does.

I also went back to the Makkai. It amuses me that she thinks there'd be a restaurant in rural Missouri with "trattoria" in the name. For authenticity, I may need to turn to George Hodgman's memoir Bettyville, about leaving his apartment in Manhattan to care for his senile mother in a small Missouri town that sounds an awful lot like the one I was exiled to for six years. (In fact, there's only about 135 km between the two places, an hour-and-a-half drive over rural routes if you don't get stuck behind someone's combine.)

[vijayjohn]

The last Bärentreff

Gummi bears?

made me feel bad for not reading any German so I looked at what was lying around

It so happens that I myself was feeling a bit like this last night for the simple reason that I've been trying lately to use the language-learning resources I have in print more and noticed (not for the first time) that I have more stuff written in German than in most other languages (the only other ones I have more in are (in this order from most to least): English, Malayalam, and Chinese, both simplified and traditional). The only work of fiction I have, though (not counting comics and a translation of the Simpson family album), is a play by Bertold Brecht called Leben des Galilei. I also have this Bible-sized book on German history that I've already started reading, so I might start with that.

For authenticity, I may need to turn to George Hodgman's memoir Bettyville, about leaving his apartment in Manhattan to care for his senile mother in a small Missouri town that sounds an awful lot like the one I was exiled to for six years. (In fact, there's only about 135 km between the two places, an hour-and-a-half drive over rural routes if you don't get stuck behind someone's combine.)

If you don't mind me asking, why were you exiled to a small Missouri town for six years?

[linguoboy]

If you don't mind me asking, why were you exiled to a small Missouri town for six years?

Because my father read To kill a mockingbird at an impressionable age.

[linguoboy]

The only work of fiction I have, though (not counting comics and a translation of the Simpson family album), is a play by Bertold Brecht called Leben des Galilei.

I feel like sending you something in the mail.

I'd have to check my ticket stub to be absolutely sure, but I think this is the work I saw at the Berliner Volksbühne in 1991. I imagine the text probably reads pretty well.

[vijayjohn]

If you don't mind me asking, why were you exiled to a small Missouri town for six years?

Because my father read To kill a mockingbird at an impressionable age.

...And thought he could help challenge racism in rural Missouri or become a folk hero or something?

I feel like sending you something in the mail.

Come to think of it, the only fiction I have even in Chinese (not counting 成语 stories and a cartoon version of what I guess are Jataka tales) is 赵氏孤儿 with a side-by-side translation into English (as Zhao the Orphan). I have no literature at all in Portuguese (or Spanish, but at least I've read literature in that), so I might try to get some next time I buy a book.

I'd have to check my ticket stub to be absolutely sure, but I think this is the work I saw at the Berliner Volksbühne in 1991. I imagine the text probably reads pretty well.

That makes sense; it should be a pretty fun read. It has lots of footnotes FWIR. I won it as a prize for the National German Exam. I got to chose between that and some young adult novel that IIRC was simpler but had way too much in English in it.

[księżycowy]

You, know Vijay, I'm starting to loose my admiration for you.

I feel like sending you something myself!

[linguoboy]

If you don't mind me asking, why were you exiled to a small Missouri town for six years?

Because my father read To kill a mockingbird at an impressionable age.

...And thought he could help challenge racism in rural Missouri or become a folk hero or something?

Something like that. He wanted to be a small-town lawyer, so he moved us all out into a small town like the one he grew up in. Us city kids did not fit in there.

[vijayjohn]

You, know Vijay, I'm starting to loose my admiration for you.

I feel like sending you something myself!

So what do you have? (Oh, and I forgot that I also have this amazing Korean cartoon about India translated into Traditional Chinese that my dad bought at the airport in Taipei once. It's impressively detailed (and seems accurate) despite being aimed for kids, talking about everything from the linguistic diversity to the triple talaq and complete with step-by-step instructions for wearing a sari).

Ironically, almost everything I've read so far in Malayalam is fiction, but (with the noted exceptions of comics, etc.) I have only one work of fiction in German, one in (Simplified) Mandarin Chinese, one in French (Cyrano de Bergerac ), one in Korean, possibly one in Slovak (it's this fat novel called Bratstvo, which means 'brotherhood'; I don't know/remember whether it's fiction or not), a small pocket-sized book in Danish apparently about two Icelandic sagas, another small book in Vietnamese with a classic Chinese story, one novella in Swati/Swazi, another in Ndebele, another in Tsonga (I'm lucky one of my aunts in South Africa used to be a linguistics major!), and a gay romance novel in Czech that I bought once by accident. In German, I also have the aforementioned history book and a book on child language acquisition. In Chinese, I have this, a self-help book of sorts, a guide to Singapore, and a bunch of comics that are basically illustrated classics.

Maybe I'll go to Half-Price Books sometime soonish. I should find something interesting there (maybe even in German!). I'm guessing my dad thinks after Christmas is the best time to go since that's when people dump all the presents they got but didn't want.

[księżycowy]

Wouldn't you like to know!

[vijayjohn]

You're sending me a surprise Christmas present??

[księżycowy]

Sure. Tell me your address, and I'll give you a surprise alright....

[vijayjohn]

"Officer, I have a suspicion that someone I know might be involved in terrorism...I think he just threatened to send me a bomb in the mail!"
"Really?! Well, that's very serious! How would you describe them?"
"Well, he's a white male...slightly older than me, a huge weeb, and very much interested in Biblical Studies, Hebrew, and American Indian languages. He doesn't speak any Arabic that I know of but is interested in it and also speaks a bit of Irish."
"How does he look?"
"I don't know. We've never met in person, and I've never seen any pictures of him, only one of his bookshelves."
"Nah, he couldn't be a terrorist."
"Why not?"
"Because terrorists are brown, you big fat wimpy regressive liberal cuck feminazi sandnigger! MAGA"

[księżycowy]

"a huge weeb"!?

[vijayjohn]

Okay, maybe not really, but you certainly watch a lot more anime than I do. But then I guess everybody does. Also I've read way too much obscure manga.

[księżycowy]

I resemble that remark!