fates not worth opposing

organes

2010-02-07T03:02:00.000-08:00

"And even Brute Animals make use of this artificial way of making divers motions to have several significations, to Call, Warne, Chide, Cherish, Threaten, &c. especially within their own kinds. But of all other, there is none for this use comparable to the variety of instructive Expressions by Speech, wherewith Man alone is endowed, as with an Instrument suitable to the Excellency of his Soul, for the most easie, speedy, certain, full communication of the Infinite variety of his Thoughts, by the ready Commerce between the Tongue and the Ear. And if some Animals, as Parrots, Magpies, &c. may seem to be capable of the same discriminations, yet we see, that their souls are too narrow to use so great an Engine."

Holder (1665) Elements of Speech

stay in bed all day, like an eagle hunting prey

2010-01-19T03:13:00.001-08:00

IMG_5675
Originally uploaded by uylin22

na and i checked into a guesthouse in saigon's red light district to stop off after depositing fang at the airport. there are slick types that have their motorcycles parked on the sidewalks and when you walk by they say "cocaine marijuana." na thought that they were joking around but i told her that it is probably not a joke, and that you should not talk to them because they are indecorous types.

but she is the kind that likes to learn things the hard way, so she bought 100,000 dongs worth of cocaine and marrijuana, just to prove to me that it was all a joke and that it wasn't real cocaine or marijuana. it looked real to me, but she said "just wait, you'll see that it's all a joke."

we looked around for a portable cafe, the kind that have plastic tables, double stacked, and four plastic stools, the kind of dining set that will be used by a seven-year old girl and her stuffed rabbit, francine, her stuffed puppy, roenicker, and her raggedy ann doll, named myranda. then she offers them tea but it's really water, and they don't really sip it.

i ordered a can of heineken and na had an iced tea. i didn't offer a sip to anyone. a man came by walking a bicycle along. the bike had a pvc pipe frame attached to it, and on top of the frame there was a fluorescent tube, a t-8, and two sheets of clear pvc that were shiny and reflected the street lights in a swirl. inside were dried and salted squids. we considered buying and refused.

then na smoked all of the marijuana and snorted all of the cocaine, then she went to bed and fell asleep, she said that since it was a joke she could prove it to me by sleeping normally. she didn't sleep all night and in the morning she went downstairs for a cup of coffee and a bowl of pho and made a big scene, yelling at the girl working at the hotel, who until then had been on friendly terms with her, accusing her of bringing her a bowl of soup that was different from mine, different and inferior. i said that i'd be happy to switch and then the girl from the hotel blushed and na flipped out and threw her coffee cup off the table. it spilled and bounced once but didn't break, and then she started crying and said she was sorry and hoped we were still her friends, then she went upstairs and curled up in the bed like a cat and slept and slept and slept. then she woke up at 7pm fresh as a daisy .

pig roast 2

2010-01-18T19:35:00.001-08:00

IMG_5009
Originally uploaded by uylin22

this photo depicts the cleaning of the skin of a slaughtered pig in preparation for roasting.

pig roast

2010-01-18T19:34:00.001-08:00

IMG_4971
Originally uploaded by uylin22

this photo depicts the collecting of blood for preparing pudding.

going by train

2010-01-18T19:07:00.001-08:00

IMG_5526
Originally uploaded by uylin22

we went into hanoi by train train. the line is long and runs the north and south of the country. the express line makes it from saigon to ha noi in about 30 hours. some of the stops, then, are at odd hours. the ha noi bound train from saigon, express line, stops in nha trang at 05h38. at the ga an old woman asked us three times if we wanted bread or coffee. we shook our heads and ignored her and said no each time.

by and by they announced the imminent arrival of the train originating in saigon arriving on track 1. i imagined if i might get hungry in the next 24 hours and asked na if she also had a good kind of imagination about whether or not one could get hungry, so she called the woman over and bought two banh mi with terrine and herbs. not very good but we soon learned that they would be better than the meals sold on the train. we had a sleeper car with long beds that you could stretch out on. the car was otherwise shabby. everything was in steel and painted beige, and faded, maybe there was an olive green color in there. i didn't pay attention to colors in a way that i would remember what to write. but let's say that everything was painted beige, and the floors were painted olive green. the room was clean, in theory, but the way the beds were made of steel and the lights were flickered and dusty made it seem that it could never be clean. there was one table in the middle of the room that was of solid wood and fixed to the wall under the window with a steel corbel, no legs. it could support the weight of people stepping on it to climb to the
upper beds. there were four beds.

at first there was a man in one of the beds and the other one was empty. we slept and when it got light we woke up and the man came down and na chatted with him a bit. she said that until he talked, he assumed that he was a murderer, a through and through psychopath, but quickly learned that he was a nice respectable guy. this is why i think it is important to introduce yourself to strangers. for most people the default assumption is that someone they don't know is a murderer, or a pervert, or at the very least a fool and a philistine. this particular man gave me some fruit that was crunchy and juicy like an apple but very small, and with a stone pit and a floral taste. i ate two of them. the man got off at the first stop and we were alone. they came and sold food and i had
a rice plate, which i chose not to finish, and a beer.

in da nang two other people got on: there was a woman who climbed straight up to her bunk and went to sleep and never spoke to us, and a man with a leather jacket in sunglasses.

he came on just as the train was about to leave, with one of the attendants helping him to carry a heavy package of 18" sesame wafers for frying. these same kinds of wafers you see for sale on the streets sold as snacks already fried. if you are lazy or health conscious, you can just microwave them or heat them over a gas flame to make them soft. he had two briefcases also, and a plastic bag with two cans of red bull, a bottle of vitamin shake, a bottle of tiger balm mentholated rubbing oil, and two oily packages full of small banana leaf parcels, called banh it. he had two ear piercings which weren't rings or studs, but were rather small loops of thick-gauge wire embedded in the lobes. being on the topic of studs, i should note that the wall did not have any masonry, but was pure stud. maybe that is why i felt it was dirty.

this man had a stout face and short pure black hair, combed forward. he was sweating. he took out a handkerchief and wiped his face, put his sunglasses back on, then started devising how to arrange his luggage. first he hung his bag of red bull and banh it on the hook next to his bunk, but then he was holding the sesame wafer package and realized that the hook would be better used on them, so he hung the sesame wafers there and put the red bull on the table. he put his two briefcases on the bed, away from the door, then sat down and took his shoes off. na asked him if he was going all the way to
ha noi. he said yes and introduced himself. he pulled a card out of his wallet and showed it to us.

if we want to read something, i sound the words out for na, then she determines whether they match words from her dialect, then we can usually interpolate the meaning. so we found that we had in our hands a badge serving as press credentials for a newspaper based in a large city in vietnam. the man had a raspy voice when he spoke, and he jerked his head from side to side, nervously. you probably think that he is a murderer, but the way he jerked his head nervously it wasn't like he was planning to kill us.

he told na that we were brave to travel to ha noi by ourselves, because ha noi is full of thieves and tricksters and in general there is wickedness in the streets, not kindness as we might have grown used to in the south. that is why he puts his briefcases on the bed away from the door, because people are quick and they can snatch and run away. also ha noi is cold, and make sure you have a jacket, he said.

after they were done with the pleasantries he pulled out a laptop and carefully set it on the table, then he moved and sat on my bed, then he moved back to his bed, then he went back to my bed, and plugged his laptop into the electrical outlet on the wall. he inserted a disc and started playing electronic music with the computer's speakers. i went up to na's bed and took a nap.

i woke up and went out to pace around in the hallway. my knees got tired so i went back into the room and sat on my bed, so that it was all three of us there, and i started to look at his laptop, which was playing music videos. maybe i saw about 20 of them. a typical one would be showing voluptuous women in hotpants dancing on rooftops and men with aquiline noses, bleached hair and vinyl robes shouting things, shouting in a way like you imagine hitler to shout at rallies, like:

you've got to!
got to!
got to!
feel the rhythm!
and you!
and you!
move your!
move your!
make love with you!
(etc.)

that was just one of the videos, but just imagine that they are all like that.

the man, who eventually introduced himself as (paternal) uncle XXXX, saw that i was paying attention to the video and he became happy and he said we should have a little to eat, and he took out the banh it. he ate one, then offered the bag to us. he told me that i had to finish all of the bag, that it was for me. it was very delicious and i quite easily finished the whole bag. banh it each have a small shrimp with a thin edible shell and the outside is a starchy steamed dough and smeared in a savory oil. he also took out two cans of red bull, opened one for himself and gave me the other. he went into the bathroom and he came back smelling like marihuana. he gave na his business card and wrote his cell phone number on it, and told her that we should call him when we were in ha noi if we ever needed anything. his wife was a paramedic and his son, who had recently failed college entrance exams, would also be going to trade school to become a paramedic. the name we could use to address him, he also wrote that on his business card. that is how we learned what to call him.

we watched his videos i don't know how many hours. he went to the bathroom every now and then to smoke marijuana. when they came around for dinner i didn't buy any but i bought two cans of beer and gave him one. it became dark and he said that now he was going to sleep and that i should also rest. he kept the computer on and turned it so that it could be seen from both beds. i studied my grammar a bit and then fell asleep. na said she kept getting woken up
because chu XXXX several times opened his tiger balm and inhaled of it deeply and rubbed it inside his nostrils, either to improve his breathing or to improve the sensation of having smoked marijuaha in the dirty bathroom, which was the only room where the window could open.

we got into ha noi very early. just before 5am.

"beautiful memories"

2010-01-18T06:12:00.001-08:00

IMG_3792
Originally uploaded by uylin22

this is a picture of my cat.

ha noi

2010-01-18T05:27:00.000-08:00

ha noi is a city in the north where the people make use of voiced fricatives. today i came back from a tour to beautiful scenic ha long bay. on paper, it was a good tour and the operators served decent food, but i became grumpy at the end because i didn't like having a leader.

this evening i walked over to the french district with na to eat shellfish because as we remembered, quite clearly, there was an alleyway that we passed that had a huge neon sign advertising every kind of seafood, fresh and at good prices with diverse preparations. we went to that alley, the very same alley, and it turned out that in real life there was no neon sign, and the restaurants along the alleyway specialized in sea snails, eels and pigeon. na had a banh thang and i settled for pigeon porridge. the place we went to had a sign naming the types of porridges it made, with a picture of a snow white pigeon, a fish and a shrimp. it read, in vietnamese, more or less "RICE PORRIDGE: CHICKEN, FISH, SHRIMP, PIGEON, NUMBER 1 CANNOT BE BEATEN!"

a short interaction at the food stall gives a lesson on vietnamese pronouns. na says to the lady "(paternal) auntie you have porridge, auntie, do you have, auntie?" "yes, [yelling to the back] bring him (nephew) his pigeon!"

for pigeon there is not much meat except the breast, which is dark, tender if cooked properly, and not so gamey as duck. but it is a bit expensive. we went to a cafe and had iced coffee and decided that i should have a beer before we went back to the hotel.

the place where we went for beer has grown to be my number one restaurant in ha noi. there was a place with high reviews in lonely planet and also on the internet called quán an ngon, but i don't think it was so amazing, just had good solid chairs and tables but not otherwise special. this other place, which doesn't have a name as far as i know, just says outside "FRESH BEER - BEEF - FISH - HOT POT - FROG - TURTLE - NUMBER 2 xxx STREET"

the waitresses there do not wear makeup and they never smile, and they wear plain clothes, like sweaters and jeans. they are very quick with service and every table has a clipboard with a running tally of what has been ordered and how much it will cost. this is a good way to run the place because it is mostly full of young and middle-aged men who are drinking bia hoi and local vodka and smoking cigarettes and talking loudly and laughing. beer is served in tall water glasses, 6000 dongs per glass. a bottle of vodka is 80,000 dongs. (~$4.50) we had the applebee's sizzler of veal with lemongrass and sesame seed with chili and fermented shrimp dipping sauce.

if you are in ha noi old quarter, the way to remember your way around is by what is sold on each street. because each block seems to have its own industry and most of the businesses on a given block are selling the same thing. to get to the crab soup restaurant, for example, i go out and walk past stainless steel railings, turn, get to stir fry noodles corner, go down the lane of coats and pants and fried terrine, turn left and pass caged birds, fighting cocks, puppies, kittens, soft shelled sea turtles for eating and tiny hard shelled turtles for pets, pork and beef and vegetables, then i keep going and there are funerary flower arrangements and coffins, then comes electronic appliances and hot pot, then coming to the corner you have imported whisky and cognac, finally you come to crab soup just before pigeon lane. you can buy pigeons already smoked, packed inside of coke cans.

the city is dirty and cold and slightly expensive so we are going back down to the village for a break.

arrogant pronouns

2010-01-09T19:49:00.004-08:00

co 5 told us that in case we start to suffer from hunger she was packing us a box full of stir fried chicken pieces and sliced liver and hearts, and oranges, and how many baguettes? 20? 30? also if we should become tired we must come over to vi thanh to stay with her one or two more days. co 8 said that it had been thirty years since anyone could see na in person and now after such a short period she was leaving, and who knows when she would come back again, anyone could die in the intervening period. everyone was sitting on the floor crying or about to cry.

the benefit of saigon is that no one is doting on us, but the downside is that no one is doting on us. let me summarize the plot of three films that i have seen or have at least seen parts of. two are korean, one is japanese.

1. there are four sisters: sakiko, takiko, makiko, and another whose name i don't know. they are all adults. they discover that their father is having an affair with a young lady. though they haven't spoken for a long time, they begin to meet regularly to devise a scheme to stop the illicit affair and also to prevent their mother from finding out. in the process they discover that none of them has an unblemished personal life. makiko, for example, has a husband who appears to be sleeping with his secretary, but she pretends not to notice to avoid dishonor. sakiko enters into concubinage with a man who is a prizefighter. takiko falls in love with the detective she hires to investigate her father's affair. the one with no name, a widow, has been having an affair with a married man. in the end, their mother dies, and they discover that she did know about the affair, but pretended not to, because in her wisdom she knew that the coverup would bring the four of them closer together as sisters.

2. two women. one is beautiful. the other is also beautiful. two men. both are kind at heart but they talk loudly and drink beer. a mother who only wants the best for her son. it is discovered that one of the women previously was in the state of concubinage, and failed to marry the man, now she is about to get married to the brother of her ex-boyfriend's current girlfriend, or something like that. the woman is outraged because of the potential dishonor her brother might suffer if it is revealed that he married a woman who is not a virgin. her boyfriend notes that she is a good wife and kind to her mother in law, and she should not go around causing a scandal by denouncing the marriage. there is a memorable exchange:

"in america, the priest says that if anyone objects to the marriage, they should speak up, and i feel it is right, for the sake of my brother, that i should speak up."
"yes, but the priest continues to say that if you do not speak at that time, you must forever hold your peace. you must not question the marriage once it is made law."

3. one woman. she is also beautiful. a man who has a good heart and cares about the welfare of the people who buy the products that his company sells. the woman is his coworker. she is evil, at first. because she convinces the vice president to expand sales. but as she digs deeper, she uncovers a story that chills her to the very bone. what will she do?

when i was a peace corps volunteer, i didn't shave very often, because only diplomats and ngo workers were clean and walked around like they were better than me, so i wouldn't condescend to shave regularly, since i was after all a peace corps volunteer and had to show loyalty to my caste. last night i went out in saigon in the district where so many tourists go, and i saw all of the foreigners walking around in shorts, sandals, unshaven, wearing backpacks. technically i am a backpacker, but i have two kinds of aunties, four kinds of uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, together numbering in the dozens, all back in the provinces, which means that i have more honor than a backpacker. therefore i will shave every day and wear clean trousers and make them clear away the empty cans if i drink more than one beer.

test

2010-01-09T19:27:00.001-08:00

1805

2009-12-24T21:32:00.000-08:00

WIDOWER: a seven letter word, which makes use of three vowel graphemes; i used it in scrabble. scrabble is a good board game. it is not purely technique, because you also have to memorize many tricks and special types of words. it is the kind of game where a computer can always win, if you program the computer.

SLIGHTED: another seven letter word. if you have the chance to catch, but you bobble instead, this is like having the chance to greet, but instead you SLIGHT, though not exactly. CATCH:BOBBLE::GREET:SLIGHT. i also used this one in scrabble. two of my uncles, i have heard, one a WIDOWER and the other a fan of the new orleans saints. one is watching the game and he is going to eat white beans. the other guy comes over and says they should have fried shrimp, he happens to have five pounds of shrimp, it just needs peeling, deveining, butterflying, egg-bathing, breading and frying, then there could be fried shrimp. both of them are assumed to be drunk, at least that is most consistent with what is usual if any story is to come out of it. they started disputing because one of them hastily breaded the shrimp in a slipshod way. because he was impatient. even if you are impatient, you cannot inappropriately rush things; qui cito dat, bis dat.

myself and my own immediate family, we attempted to reenact the incident, exact same recipe, with less drama. shrimp diplomacy. first recipe:
===============================================
"SHRIMP" (scale down if it is not a family)

1. peel, devein, butterfly, rinse clean 5lbs. shrimp, large caliber.
2. bathe in eggs and milk, with a bit of salt and black pepper. 30-60 minutes.
3. get yourself a full box of premium saltine crackers. put them in a bag and crush them very well. add a cup or so of flour, mix with the cracker crumbs and spread a thick layer on a broad platter.
3a. heat the oven to a low 200F. prepare a large baking sheet and line it with paper towels.
4. warm your oil (corn or peanut, which has a low smokepoint) in a cast iron pot, by and by it should reach 365-375F
5. for each prawn, take it out, press it gently in the breading.
6. meanwhile, someone else, because you are doing the breading, is frying each batch of these for 2 minutes and then pulling them out of the oil and putting them in the warmed pan in the oven. let the oil recover to its temperature before adding another batch.
7. when i did it it turned out to be a good idea to have two skillets going at once, because once the oil starts to darken from the breading in one, then you can let it rest and go to the other.

8. dipping sauce: (you could do this beforehand). whisk together quite well, 2c of ketchup, 1/4c worcestershire sauce, juice of 1 lemon, 1/2c minced horseradish. taste and adjust.
==================================================

my father in law says that he is too busy, because he is always working, and that children (anyone under 30) are foolish and they will forget to eat so you have to always be cooking food so that they will eat and not suddenly get hungry and suffer. my mother has the same attitude. if you are going to run errands for an hour, maybe better you wait and don't go, but first prepare a sandwich and pack it so in case hunger strikes you while you are out in the car, you eat your sandwich. you will also have packed some fruit for a balanced meal. but he is too busy, so he doesn't cook every day, he cooks every other day but makes a double ration:

second recipe:

canh chua( sour soup )

make a broth of water and tamarind paste. prepare bac ha (taro stalk), bean sprouts, tomato quarters. get a large fresh catfish, whole fish, cut into steaks with bone-in. put the head into a dish for hot pot, pour in the broth and start heating. once it begins to simmer, you start adding the vegetables and pieces of fish. pull them out when they are ready to eat. and eat them. a dipping sauce of nuoc mam with fresh whole thai chili. also eat it with rice. at the end of the meal drink a cup of the broth with a little rice as a digestif. by then it will be very fragrant with fish, vegetables and tamarind.

with leftover pieces of fish, you make cá kho (braised fish), but i don't know how to make that one yet.

third recipe:

vit náo chao. (duck cooked with chao) get a duck and cut it with a cleaver into boiling pieces. take a jar of chao (pickled tofu). add it to the duck. add 2-3 pounds of whole peeled cocoyams, small taro. add rock sugar and mix it well, ferment an hour outside or overnight in the fridge. now begin boiling a large kettle of water. set the duck mixture over fire in a large pot. let it start to heat until the bottom smells like it's cooking. now pour a can of beer in there. now pour in the boiling water. enough to cover the meat. boil it softly for 10 minutes. if you taste it and it's not sweet enough, add rock sugar. if you taste it and it's not salty enough, add more chao. don't add salt. make a dipping sauce of chao, crushed roasted groundnuts, minced lemongrass and minced fresh thai chili. transfer some of the soup to a hotpot and set on the portable burner on the table. then you have two types of fresh greens. one could be rau muong but that type didn't get used when i watched. it was two other things and i don't know what they are. i can't find a picture of them anywhere. you put greens in the boiling pot and pull them out. then you start pulling out pieces of duck, of cocoyam, of greens, dip them in dipping sauce and eat them. you should be drinking beer because when the dish starts to boil down you pour some beer in it.

2009-12-02T14:01:00.000-08:00

ah manozo xitechalmomachiti,
xitechalmolnamiquilili in tocnoyo, in iuhqui tiquitta, in iuhqui
tictzacua in nican tlalticpac: ca nelli mach in totech cehui in
tonalli, auh in ehecatl, in itztic, in cecec: . concern thyself
with us, remember us in our misery -- how we seek, how we are
imprisoned here on earth, for verily the sun, and the wind, the
cold, the freezing tire us.

-Florentine Codex

dicta

2009-11-24T17:49:00.001-08:00

soon i will start traveling and maybe i will put travel updates on this blog if i can have something noteworthy to write about. tomorrow i will go to germany. i have to carry things on the plane to work on because i am an important person who is always doing things, important things that nobody can understand.

i remembered a certain word or phrase and then i remembered some time about eight years ago and a college apartment and ruth's description, something like: "he sits, he generates garbage, like a machine, he is disgusting, he is disgusting, because i took the ketchup bottle, the one with the benzocaine in it (because everyone took home the benzocaine that they synthesized in class, and i put mine in a bottle o ketchup), and he just kept eating his tater tots, and he was drooling a lot, and he didn't care, even when i told him he didn't care, he kept eating, he just ate it even more." now i don't remember what phrase. it is even a phrase that i use to this day, and that phrase is the only useful thing that survives from that time, eight years ago, in base circumstances, because everything that you are no longer is base.

but the real reason i am writing is to be able to publish two quotations, some might say taken out of context, which help to explain why the government only wants to manipulate you. the second one really made me recall a tour we got of a castle in Czesky Krumlov, and this situation was only two years ago, and so not nearly as base, but the tour guide showed us a dusty green glass container, like something you put cut tulips in with water, and it must have held a good liter, maybe two liters, and he said when there were guests for the king, the first thing they had to do was to fill that container with wine, and they had to drink it all without stopping, or else they would be thrown out of the palace. these things are coming from the famous florentine codex:

120. ihuan oc no ce tlacatl tlamacazqui, conitqui, cuappiaztli, ielpan contilquetza in malli, in oncan ocatca iyollo, conezzotia, huel eztitlan compolactia: and another man, and offering priest, carried the [hollow] eagle cane, set it standing in the captive's breast [cavity,] there where the heart had been, stained it with blood, indeed submerged it in blood.

637. ca ayac nicnocahuia ayac nicquixtia in macamo nicmaca in octli, in nictlahuantia, in niquihuintia, . no one do i except, no one do i release, whom i do not give pulque, make drunk, make besotted.

2. in cuauhtli: aixmauhqui, amixmauhtiani: huel quixnamiqui, huel quitztimoquetza in tonitiuh: . the eagle is fearless, a brave one; it can gaze into, it can face the sun.

tom petty

2009-09-12T18:50:00.001-07:00

i was driving, must have been today, turned on the radio and they played tom petty's breakdown. it was stuck in my head so i listened to it at home, and found that he seemed to have a strange accent in the first verse.

to wit,

-he syllabifies so as to avoid coda /z/ in is and it's, pronouncing it as [s] in the next onset.
-/o/ is usually lowered
-/schwa/ in away is hypercorrected to [e]
-some diphthongs in stress position have their first portion significantly lengthened, and the second part is pronounced weekly, to give the impression of a monophthong. most notably in like i do, where both diphthongs are simplified to [a].

the net effect is that he sounds partly mexican.

I am addicted to Parle G

2009-09-01T20:29:00.000-07:00

2-DAY SHOPPING PASS

2009-07-20T22:30:00.000-07:00

at one point i intended to toil the summer away like the animals of a particular fable that i saw in cartoon form. the lazy animals are bailed out because the hard-working animals hold a monopoly on virtue and they are also charitable. still there are books on my shelf, some of which are my sick idea of pleasure reading, some are generally known as pleasure reading in some circles, and one or two would be considered by all to be pleasure reading.

i just finished one of the first column, which led me to make a series of interlibrary loan requests which, if fulfilled, will have a very long shot at being honored by my reading the whole thing or even any significant part thereof.

i got armagnac for my birthday. since i am not quite the lazy animal but only the animal who just manages answer to the consequences of his idleness without a bailout, for unmerited occasions i only drink the cognac that we got for deglazing, which is still a highly respectable and often rapped about mark because everything had to be perfect.

which shows that if i am to use time less than optimally, i want to at least be somewhere on the target, which is why i read the neglected books whose reading would be wreckless indulgence during the proper work season, but whose reading in the aorist sense is considered to be an enrichment.

i mean to confess that i shot and posted on youtube a cat video and played grand theft auto in two fruitless hours of trying to shoot down the helicopter of the woman who betrayed me, catalina.

2666 by Roberto Bola?o:

==================

after this novelist's death and the heavily publicized release of the english translation of his posthumous novel, i wanted to read the spanish edition (which did not enjoy the wide distribution and publicity of the english translation) and ended up recalling it from a fellow library patron who, i calculated, is also a graduate student. this person never counter-recalled it, so maybe it was just sitting on their shelf and they didn't want to call my bluff. i read 100 pages or so then put it down for a few months, then this week read another 100 pages until i got to a section break.

there are some literary critics who are all single and who have flexible work schedules and ample savings. this is why they freely travel within europe. they are all interested in the same novelist, and three of them have a menage a trois. there is one part where two of them (at this point everyone had travelled to mexico on a whim) decide to stop waking up early and stop eating breakfast in their hotel and they go to breakfast on chilaquiles and beer.

although i have never participated in a menage a trois with literary critics, i did have the good fortune to find at the grocery store the kind of sale where you know that it is so below cost that someone is intentionally losing money, and you wonder why. a brand of beer normally retailing for $7 the six-pack was going for $1.50 the six pack. i brought home ten, and after learning about the characters' breakfast, even though i intentionally kept the beers at room temperature to prevent myself from drinking them, i could not stop myself from obeying product placement, even if it meant drinking beer with ice cubes.

by strange coincidence, while at the store i also bought ingredients to make chilaquiles, all this well before having read about the critics' breakfast.

i read a collection of stories by the same author and the characters of these stories always visited prostitutes and their real problem was not knowing how to pass the time, because they never had a job. i think it is important to represent this kind of challenge in literature, so that when i have a vacation i can be informed of real or imaginary techniques for passing time when no one will notice if you're not working.

also the characters, in 2666 and the short stories, face opaque personal crises. the author only portrays the outward symptoms of their personal crises, as if he were reporting on these imaginary people scientifically and wanted to only report the facts and leave out all speculation. we only know that fulano ate chilaquiles and woke up late and seduced a working class woman and promised to mary her and one time felt tired, and previously felt sick. there is no indication of what causes him to behave this way. other writers might instead spend the whole time writing about the thousand natural shocks and how they jostled their protagonist's thinking, and what he was thinking and how his feelings caused him to eat chilaquiles, etc. i can't say which style i prefer, but i find that bola?o handles this technique with skill. i the reader feel like a voyeur and i don't feel omniscient like readers of other works of fiction might.

the narrator of the bola?o stories is above it all. in the works of onetti i have read the narrator is more or less ignorant of the contents of the characters' minds, but still has some kind of opinion about them, though he bases it on things he has fabricated.

things that can disturb the peace

2009-07-14T21:35:00.001-07:00

some practice translating from Walsingham's Historia Anglicana (vol.I p.450 of Riley's 1864 ed.)

The Derangement of John Wycliff

At the same time, that old hypocrite, the angel of Satan, harbinger of the Antichrist, not to be called "John Wycliff," but rather "Wykbeleve" (wicked belief), the heretic, his derangement continuing, has seemed to devour Jordan, and plunge all Christians into hell: reconsidering even the wretched opiniones of Berengari and Oakleaf, has worked to build upon them: after having been consecrated in Mass by a priest, the true bread and wine, as they were before, become at that instant Christ, as it has always been. But more specifically, this bread is worth no more than any other unless it is given the true blessing of a priest. Yet if this were the body of christ, he has professed, the neck of his God could be broken into pieces. He has additionally confirmed that Christians are mistaken in venerating that Sacrament, saying that bread is an inanimate thing, and one would rather venerate a toad, or whatever living thing, rather than that, because it is much better to praise an animate thing than something lacking a soul: and with such ravings he has seduced many into the same error.

de uxoribus

2009-07-10T12:48:00.000-07:00

NYTimes' Judith Warner is a columnist for the New York times who writes about the issues of mothers. In her most recent column, she talks about a woman who was charged with crimes for having left some children, the oldest of which were 12, at a shopping mall. In another, she talks about how mothers are the subject of unsolicited criticism about their parenting by strangers.

Her theory is that mothers and professional women are under attack by the population in the US. I have noted that in the anecdotes she reports, it is usually women who are the aggressors. In the shopping mall story, the police were called after children 8, 7 and 3 years were left at a perfume counter while the 12 year olds were trying on clothing. I am imagining that the attendant at the perfume counter is the one who called the police, and I would even go out on a limb and guess that the perfume salesperson was a woman.

Warner suspects that the aggression against mothers is part of backlash against improved rights for women in the US. It is important to note that in earlier times it was a good and reasonable thing to do to allow children, even very young children, to go into public by themselves and to run errands for their parents. Now this is not so. It is a great scandal to leave a child alone, and I think that the scandal mongers are conservative women and insurance underwriters. They are the great criars of kidnapping and accidental injury.

I am saying all of this because as a gentleman and the ambassador of men, I would like to make sure that I am not getting caught up in Warners indictments. I am blaming women and insurance underwriters.

detective work

2009-07-10T11:54:00.001-07:00

here is the specimen:

"...niquintlalia itzintla in itlathocachicahualitzin inthohuei tlathocatzin in icaamoaquiqui ynhuayolqui..."

the first six words follow from standard forms found in dictionaries and come out as "I seat them at the feet of his eminence our great lord". "his eminence" is not ideal but is at this point OK for "i-tlathoca-chicahuali-tzin", where the root is chicahualiztli (the essence or abstract property of strengthening, in one dictionary "force du courage"), modified by tlathoca (ruler, lord), then i- is a possessive prefix and -tzin is an honorific suffix, so the closest thing to the actual meaning of itlathocachicahualitzin, i am guessing, is "his esteemed lordly eminence", which should be an appositive epithet for inthohuei tlathocatzin (our great lord).

the trouble comes with icaamoaquiqui. i have to wander in the dark and make a few educated guesses. my first guess is that it should be broken up as ica-ahmo-aquiqui. ica (with) and ahmo(not) are no problem, but aquiqui does not appear in any dictionary. however, google reveals that it is found in one Spanish-Nahuatl entry in Molina's 16th century dictionary, i.e.

Enriscado. ... mouican aquiqui motexcalhuiqui

enriscado (risky, one who takes risks). ... he takes himself aquiqui he throws himself from a steep precipice.

now it becomes very likely that aquiqui is a spelling-variant of aquihqueh (who, whoever), so Molina gave as one of his definitions of enriscado as "whoever goes and jumps off of a high cliff". this kind of definition is very common when you ask someone randomly to explain a foreign word to you. they'll give you a highly specific example of what sort of situation would apply to that word.

now it is coming together. ynhuayolqui should mean "their parents, their relations"

the final product is:

"I will seat them at the foot of his eminence our great tlatoani, though not along with their escorts."

more usury

2009-07-09T20:21:00.000-07:00

"...Soto allows that lucrum cessans can be asked in delay, theft, or compulsory loans; in all these cases an external force prevents the victim from the opportunity of laboring with his money. It is remarkable that in none of these arguments does Soto attempt to answer Summenhart's contention that one is held to compensate a man voluntarily ceasing from work if the paying of such compensation is the condition under which he forgoes his work . . . His stubborn denial of the right to compensation for damage voluntarily occurred . . . must be ascribed to a fear that to admit lucrum cessans was to abandon the usury prohibition. As he believes, "this ghost of lucrum cessans not many years ago opened that chasm and whirlpool of usury."

Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury

lucrum cessans = foregone profit

brenne to scamelliche askes

2009-06-30T12:14:00.000-07:00

here is the phrase:

...inozequin intechmonequiz, ipan Incahuitl chicohuazen mextli...

the first four words should mean "additionally thereupon is needed a period of time"

chicohuazen does not appear in any dictionary nor in any google book
chico- according to one dictionary is a prefix usually meaning "to one side, perversely"
chicohuia according to another, means "to do things unfairly, to favor one side", but the form we have doesn't exactly match any inflection of chicohuia
cem means "one," and at the end of the word [m] becomes [n], but this particular scribe we have noted that sometimes he leaves off written 'n' at the end of a word, and -cen normally doesn't appear as a suffix, if i remember correctly
mextli, according to the first dictionary, is a variant of mixtli, which all sources agree to mean "cloud." additionally the second dictionary includes this example phrase from the florentine codex "intlâcahmo tleh mixtli," (if there aren't any clouds => provided that the weather is favorable)

so we'll just have to guess and say

"additionally thereupon is needed a period of time to allow for inclemencies"

and the record does not indicate whether this is a guess or a certainty, when all is done.

traducing the speaker

2009-06-30T00:02:00.000-07:00

to waste time but not prodigally i like to read things in middle english. what i was supposed to be doing instead of reading middle english was translating from nahuatl a document that is nothing but variations on scamel. here is a passage from Langland's Piers Plowman (14th century), where he explains the meaning of Job 15:34 in the vulgate bible:

ignis devorabit tabernacula eorum qui libentur accipiunt munera, &c.
Amonge this lettered ledes, this Latyn is to mene
That fyre shal falle, and brenne al to blo askes
The houses and the homes of hem that desireth
Yiftes or Yeres-yyves bicause of here offices.

the trusty oxford english dictionary says:
lede = race, group of people
brenne = burn
blo = a dark-blue color, like a bruise, or lead
askes = ashes
yifte = gift
Yeres-yyve = a new year's gift

the latin is, more or less, "fire shall devour the tabernacle of those who please to take gifts"

munera is usually translated as bribes in english language bibles

Langland's elaboration is from having to write in a type of alliterative verse, and his description of munera (Yiftes or Yeres-yyves) is a more accurate description of the concept than "bribe" is.

whoever has tried to translate Piers Plowman to modern english and keep the alliterative verse must struggle, since lede, blo and yeresyeve are extinct as english words. even if yeresyeve were revived, it would no longer start with the same sound as gift. one would have to set out looking for new pairs.

for thise aren men on this molde that moste harme worcheth

2009-06-29T18:23:00.000-07:00

now we have a kitten, because i am a pragmatic person.

a controversial claim from Chomsky and Halle's Sound Pattern of English:
"There has, in other words, been little change in lexical representation since Middle English..."

i also have a playstation 2 controller that plugs into the computer.

these are things that i can do in the summertime.

in texas it was warm, over 100 degrees every day. there were many people there, all familiar with each other. at spiderhouse coffee shop, they now offer table service, which makes it difficult if you intend to go there and buy nothing. as i understand it opened in 1995. in the year 2000 i used to go next door to sell plasma and the homeless teenagers were one time lying there talking about how with these fifteen dollars apiece, and the thirty dollars we can borrow from X, and Y, who can front it to us at the lowest quality, we can rent a motel room of the seediest variety, far from the shelter where they don't allow alcohol, and we each have a seven dollar 175mL bottle of jack daniels. i think the plasma place is shut down now. i best remember that i was taking physics 2 and it was difficult. and this very skinny girl told me that i should join her to study at spiderhouse coffee shop, where you don't have to buy anything. this was the year 2000 and i decided to not go to spiderhouse, but only to stay at the plasma center, because at this time i had it calculated to where i would get one hamburger ($2.50), one order of french fries ($1.25), one glass of ice water (free), four times a week at either 1am or 1:30am, which would be $15, then i'd have $20 left for the weekend, and buying a cup of coffee would throw everything off in multiple ways that are so distant from important now in 2009. when i went i ordered a coffee. the oldest man at the table paid for everything, because he is powerful. you might think that i now regret it, because i could have ordered a cucumber margarita or anything else to BEAT THE HEAT, but in fact i was hung over.

i brought that coffee with me. it was cold, but i was even able to take a sip from it ten hours later. this was after i had finished overseeing the grill.

Shakespeare in the park is a feature of summers in Buffalo, NY. residents bring camping chairs and sip wine from their coolers and give out one dollars to the poor players who strut and ask for donations to keep our beloved festival free. the time that i went we saw the Tempest. the tempest contains the word

scamel

which i think is a very nice word, with a delicate nuance of a meaning that helps people to share their feelings. scamel will cause you to have feelings you never had before. the Oxford English Dictionary defines scamel as follows:

Meaning uncertain: the statement in quot. 1866 is of doubtful value. Some have proposed to read staniel.

below are two quotations of the only attested uses (outside of metalinguistic or lexicographical discussion) of scamel. the first quote is from the Tempest,

"And sometimes I'le get thee young Scamels from the Rocke."

the second quote, as we are told, is of doubtful value.

i started to feel a bit dizzy when i was reading the Tempest, and came across a word i didn't know, and looked it up in the dictionary, and the dictionary told me it didn't know what the word meant. we only know that a scamel is a living thing that is edible and found among rocks on beaches. a staniel, which "some have proposed" as the reading for scamel, is a type of falcon, e.g.

i digress. sometimes, even the dictionary doesn't know. one theorem of classical logic is known as ex falso, quodlibet which means "if shit's fucked up, fuck it."

the kitten is always sleeping. if the kitten were grown, it might be able to go hunting for young scamels. perhaps scamels became extinct due to overharvesting before anyone could write down what exactly they were.

this summer i liken my job to the mystery of the scamel. i have to determine something that nobody, at the moment knows yet. and the things that i determine through careful investigation and long hours of study, will be of such interest to the general public as scamels are.

addendum:

From the London Daily News, printed in New York Times, 25 June 1892: A Norfolk man observes that "young bartailed godwits are in Autumn called scamels on the north coast of Norfolk."

giggling

2009-06-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

"The verbs to mother and to father mean very roughly 'to act as a mother/father toward someone', but are entirely different in the exact actions that count as relevant."
Jackendoff, Foundations of Language

solutions to the problem of things that formerly appeared to have no name

2009-05-16T19:55:00.000-07:00

...money rented ad pompam. In such a contract, ... money was transferred to a bailee for the specific purpose of display so that he might impress others with his wealth. The money was not consumed, but used, and the charge was for its use. The Gloss's treatment here seems to assume that the fundamental distinction between this contract and a loan is the incidence of risk.

Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury

usury

2009-05-14T16:23:00.000-07:00

là dove di'che usura offende la divina bontade, e il groppo svolvi.
-Inferno

wherever usury disturbs, divine grace, and difficulties, dissolve