Hello, friends and enemies. I was thinking, as I often do, about words this week. I was listening to a podcast where they mentioned “book tube” (the part of YouTube where people talk about books) and it occurred to me that the “tube” in YouTube is a reference to TVs, specifically the old CRT TVs, which used a big tube to make the TV go. Now we’re using “tube” as a suffix and it doesn’t really have any relationship to its original meaning, not unlike “-gate” as in Watergate (which, it should be noted, is the name of a hotel and not a literal gate). Unrelated but also word-related, I was considering the word “interesting.” Interesting is my ultimate compliment because I am at least a little curious about everything so for something to fully take up my attention, it’s serious. I realize I describe things as interesting a lot but I think most people use it as filler. It’s often used for “weird” just “I’m bored and want to say something noncommittal.” Not me though. I’m fucking interested.
Books and Other Words
I picked up The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi because the description said the main character is a translator and I think that’s neat. However, this book is horror and that’s not really my genre. We know something bad is happening so it’s not all that surprising when we get to the horrific thing, but I guess the real horror is the friends we made along the way, or something. The titular “Centre” is a very expensive language learning program in which learners spend 10 days in a sort-of monastic seclusion listening to recordings from a person speaking in their target language. Like magic, partway through the course, the learner suddenly finds themselves fluent and able to understand without having put in any apparent work. I won’t spoil the horror of it, but the novel is ultimately, I think, about colonialism and consumption. What happens when people from a country like England consume a developing country’s culture? How do we perceive people who are lower in the hierarchy—whatever the hierarchy may be—than we are? Furthermore, what would actually make us happy? These are all questions The Centre grapples with.
I was about two-thirds through Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time and puzzling over what, exactly, it was trying to tell me. I felt like I had cracked it, but then I read the acknowledgements and laughed. Bradley says she “became unhinged about various antique lads who died in the polar regions.” This book is actually a self-insert fanfic. In The Ministry of Time, a British intelligence agency has discovered a “time door” and they have pulled five individuals out of time. “Bridges” are agents assigned to each time traveler to acclimate them to the present. The story focuses one one bridge and her time expat, Graham Gore (his Wikipedia article has a photo [he’s attractive I guess, but he’s not the type to move me to write a whole novel]), the “antique lad” mentioned in the acknowledgements. In addition to polar explorer fanfic, one could also read this as yet another of our era’s warnings about global warming. We also meet characters from the future who briefly enlighten us about the relative uninhabitability of the earth; even the present is wracked by killer storms and unseasonable heat. I notice the climate crisis seeping into more and more of our fiction because it’s infiltrating our reality too. I think a traditional ending for this line of thought would be to say like “all our little choices add up,” and they do but you don’t need to get a lecture from me right now about what is ultimately a structural problem. Anyway, it was a fun read!
I was inspired to read The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen by this fascinating interview the author did with Anne Helen Petersen in Culture Study. The book is set in 19th century Finland, during a time when the Sami people were being slowly fenced in by settler culture. There are a lot of social and political threads in this story: the reindeer herders running into problems with farmers, the cult-like following that a local preacher has (and his way of preaching is not approved by the state church), young women trying to figure out where they fit into society. I thought this was a really interesting story and I’d love to read more about the Sami and this period. I am also curious about Pylväinen’s other novel, which is based on her childhood growing up in this little-known Finish offshoot of Christianity.
Tadek and the Princess is a novella that fills in some of the story for one of the characters from Alexandra Rowland’s A Taste of Gold and Iron, which I read a few weeks ago. It’s a very sweet and sentimental novella that gives us some backstory for Tadek’s childhood and expands on his relationship with the prince in the story’s present day. I may have cried a little but to be fair, I have been crying a lot this week.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- ICJ says Israel’s presence in Palestinian territory is unlawful via Al Jazeera. From the article, “The court said Israel has no right to sovereignty of the territories, is violating international laws against acquiring territory by force and is impeding Palestinians’ right to self-determination. It said other nations were obliged not to ‘render aid or assistance in maintaining’ Israel’s presence in the territory.” I’m glad we are, as a society, formally recognizing that what Israel is doing is wrong. Now we just need the U.S. government to stop sending them money.
- Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that via The Guardian. I love to see people making information free! I’m looking forward to reading some of the articles in their Asymptote publication on translation and featuring translated literature.
- Hacker Shows How to Get Free Laundry For Life via 404 Media. This is just a little feel-good story of a man getting fed up with shitty laundry machines stealing his cash and that man learning how to jailbreak the machine and run it without paying. The instructions are free and online for anyone to use.
Doing Stuff
Last weekend, Abby and I went to see a flamenco show. Flamenco dancing seems like a cousin of tap dancing in a way but it’s much more dramatic, and of course the dancing is connected to the other aspects of flamenco like the singing and the guitar playing. The show just had one dancer, although I kind of thought there would be more. It was very interesting to see her perform with a bravado we normally only see in men. Women’s artistic performances are often smiling or sexual in some way, however I would say this was a sensual, but not a sexualized, performance. I also realized this is definitely not an American art because they don’t make all the performers give a big, fake smile the whole time. The singers and musicians they just had neutral expressions (or even looked a little mad at times but that’s probably just what their faces felt like doing). There was a little girl in the row in front of us who immediately started stomping around after seeing the dancer. I love that. I love the idea of seeing something and immediately proclaiming “that looks fun, let me try!” I wish we had more of that attitude to go around.
Languages
This week I finished translating an article on LGBT literature in Mexico from Spanish to English, which I am proud of. I guess I have decided that queer literature is the subject I want to focus my Spanish to English translations on at the moment, and I’m having fun with it. After that I did a much shorter translation for the book that’s considered the seminal gay Mexican novel, El vampiro de la colonia Roma. I was searching for an English version of the book to find out if it had a different title (translated book titles are not always a direct translation), but I found an obituary for Luis Zapata, the author, which suggested that someone ought to do a new English translation. I haven’t even read this book yet but I’m like “wow, what if I did it!” I don’t know if I’ll do this but I do want to find out if you can just translate something then shop it around to a publisher. How does that all work? Perhaps this really can be my future.
I would also like to note that my translations from Icelandic Wikipedia are continuing. Among other articles, I’ve recently translated pieces about Vestari-Jökulsá (a glacier river) and Tindastóll (a mountain). I’m staying committed to the Icelandic geography beat for now.
Kitchen Witchery
I made a some really good recipes over the last two weeks! We loved this corn and asparagus pasta with ricotta, even though I accidentally ordered a quarter pound of asparagus instead of a whole pound, so it was a little light on the vegetable component. The recipe worked really well with this wide, tubular pasta. I’ve been trying to eat more tofu so I made this tofu with peanut sauce and we really liked that too! You basically can’t go wrong with a peanut sauce. To use the baby lima beans I got in my bean club subscription, I tried this slow-cooker butter beans with pecorino and pancetta recipe. It is pretty good but I made it too brothy (Of course. I always overestimate how much water to add.). I decided to treat it like a soup and tossed in some leftover raviolis and I was quite satisfied with that.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Regular readers already know that Huey died last week. I’ve been missing her a lot. I am not as emotionally wrecked as when Viola died since I at least had a little warning. I got out a lot of crying in her last couple of days. I am still crying though. I wish I could have taken a week off work to mope but there is no bereavement leave when your pets die. I got so used to Huey chilling on that spot in the couch that I had to put a different blanket there because I kept expecting to see her on the usual one. I also bought a little stuffed animal to keep me company on the couch because that’s just the kind of person I am. It’s very hard to find a tuxedo cat stuffed animal and this was the best we could do. He’s a little goofy looking, but he’s cute.
Fritz seems to be fine with the current state of affairs. He has ascended to only-child status and is glad he doesn’t have to chase anyone out of “his” bedroom. Feel free to place bets for how long he will remain an only child.
Here’s one more Huey photo for the road.
