I finally finished reading Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience over the holidays. A worthwhile read, although I found that it fizzled out a bit at the end. After two wonderful set pieces about his first affair and his time working aside his brother-in-law in a wonderfully underachieving business, the attempt at the end to wrap it back into the framing device of psychoanalysis seemed a bit of an afterthought, and didn't seem to work, entirely.
Svevo is credited with beiing an influence on Joyce (maybe even being a role model for Bloom). I have also seen comparisons of Svevo to Proust in the early history of stream-of-consciousness modern novels. I guess it is questionable whether Proust knew of or read Svevo (I've got two massive Proust biographies to read some day) - he was fairly unremarked in his day - but the comparison is reasonable - they both carry on a running commentary about the failings of others and their own neurasthenic miseries. It gives a real sense of feeling relatively better in a schadenfreude sense.
We watched three films over the Christmas break. Every now and again it's nice to take some time to catch up on older releases. First up was Ken Loach's Bread and Roses. This film had some Cannes hype, and the DVD box said that it had won a Danish award for "best foreign film, not American." Nice category! But, to be honest, I didn't think much of it.
I haven't seen any of Loach's other films, but he does have quite a reputation as a crusading filmmaker. On that account, the film's politics might be received sympathetically. But the story itself was pretty poor, and at times it just made me cringe, with characters under or over-developed and sympathies so misplaced that the cathartic climax of the film just left me cold. The bread and roses of the film title are a hollow victory that seem to lose the promise I supposed that Loach would have attached to them.
Next up was The Virgin Suicides. Strange flick. I can't say I really got this one. The tragic end of innocence? The sense that people really are that way? That children, even emerging into womanhood, are so unempowered as not to cry out for help in a more powerful way, accepting their end as a necessary act in their own life story? Mythology of vestal virgins? The film itself was nicely done - it reminded me of Dazed and Confused in its captured view of 1970s America.
And last, Girl, Interrupted. This one I really enjoyed - dark, and intense. I thought Winona Ryder did a fine job of personifying the mental illness - of not really understanding what was happening around her, while at the same time seeming very together. This is the first time I've seen a film with the director's commentary over the top - we almost turned around and watched the entire film again. And I found the extra scenes, which the director said would have added an hour to the film, would have been a welcome addition. He joked about appealing only to the Berlin Alexanderplatz crowd, but this was a hard film to watch that probably could have justified the extra scenes of the descent into depression and delusion.
I've finally visited my first confluence. 25S, 49W. I've been itching to get out and use my GPS for the past couple of months, but apart from way-marking my trip to work I haven't had the chance to do anything with it for a while.
Confluence-hunting seems a passion right up my alley. Why do it? Because. Like their FAQ says, there are probably as many reasons as there are hunters. It accomplishes very little, and yet at the same time it calls attention to a fundamental fact - lines on a map only have the meaning that we assign to them. People go out of their way to visit the Four Corners monument in the desert southwest US, but there is nothing more there than a marker noting the juncture of four state lines. Interesting only by convention. And 25S, 49W is a very uninteresting place, in the middle of a logging road in the forest upcountry about 60 km from where we live.
The whole family was with me, although in truth it might have been better if I'd gone it alone. We were 2-1/2 hours late to our main appointment of the day at a convent in a small town nearby.
Lasting observation of the day, as we drove the many kilometers down this road to the confluence point: it is so sad to me that people who live in such richness can be considered poor. We saw farmhouses that were simple, sure, but when I look at that environment, I wonder what more I would need. I thought a lot about what Wendell Berry wrote in Unsettling America, a book with a long afterlife in my mind...the more you see of the wrongs of industrial agriculture, the more you long for the landscape that he is sustaining - the simple life; hard, rewarding work, attached to the land, but at the same time filled with an intellectual richness not erased by the pulling down of fences and the depopulating of the countryside. Is it Luddism to suggest that technology is a destroyer as well as a creator? To suggest that the old way might be better?
Last night was our final Portuguese lesson of the year. To celebrate the holidays and the beautiful summer weather, we combined our lessons, moved them outside, served some drinks and snacks and just had a good chat, in Portuguese, with our teacher.
As dusk came in and our lesson wrapped up, I took the baby up to bed while my wife took the teacher back to her home. After I got the baby down, I came downstairs, grabbed a beer and went to sit out on the patio. We have strung a bunch of white fairy lights around the railing, and their dim light stood out against the deepening darkness.
I sat on the patio, drinking my beer, listening to the Nutcracker and enjoying the peaceful evening.
We received a Christmas letter from some friends who are farmers in Scotland. They wrote of the wet summer, the resulting poor crop yields and poor prices, of their waning enthusiasm for the farming life, and of working at second jobs to make ends meet. And yet you could read in their letter of the joys of their lives, and especially of their son's enthusiasm for living in the country.
It occurred to me that if I could look out beyond the petty frustrations of my life - the little defeats I feel with each day that passes bringing us not really closer to a sense of calm, a sense of belonging to a place; if I could look more broadly over the past year - at our move to Brazil, at our comfortable home, the health of ourselves and our families, at the baby's first year; first words; first steps; if I could consider all of these things in retrospect, that it really had been a pretty good year.
I just sat in the dark, my mind wandering with the sequence of ethnic dances (Chinese, Russian, Arabian) , feeling thankful for all that we have. My wife came back and sat down with me. We commented on what a quiet night it was, what a beautiful setting we were in, and then - just then - the Christmas spirit quietly joined us there on the patio.
"I saw how an entire nation could be made to deny its ideals, and watched the early, cautious moves toward accommodation. I understood that hope is an instrument of evil, and the Kantian categorical imperative - ethics in general - is but the pliable handmaiden of self-preservation." - Imre Kertész – Nobel Lecture
I've had a browse around the Creative Commons website, and I hope this catches on, particularly the Founders' Copyright. Talk about Common Sense.
I was also intrigued by their effort to register transfers of material from copyright to the public domain:
If you prefer to dedicate your work to the public domain, where nothing is owned and all is permitted, we'll help you do that. In other words, we'll help you declare "No rights reserved."
I am thinking to get involved with publicising this. The work done by Jason Schultz to illustrate the number of books languishing in the netherworld of retroactive copyright extension is truly amazing. There must be copyright holders out there who would release their rights (probably a lot of them are held by heirs of the original writers). These people could take a look at the numbers, including the long-term potential of any republication (for the very few dusty old books that might get a reprinting), and make a gift to culture of the rights they may inadvertently and unknowingly possess.
In other words, of the entire universe of books published in the United States that are potentially affected by the retroactive 1976 extension, only 2.3 percent remain commercially available, while 183,013, or roughly ninety-seven percent of those works, remain commercially dormant and inaccessible. (from the Schultz research)
Among other things that I find really useful about the new licenses is that Point Foundation - the Whole Earth Magazine people - are adopting one of these licenses - the Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 - for the publication of much of their content, including the wonderful article, "Places to Intervene in a System", by the late Donella Meadows.
I reckon that most people will look to use this license - it makes the content free to reproduce, with attribution and in its exact form, for non-commercial purposes. Probably many people are happy with the ethics of retaining control over the content of their work while letting it be free to use in the academic and non-commercial domains.
Now, if only the Whole Earth people would get around to putting up some more recent content!
I bought another block of shares in my company today.
I worked for 11 years for a company that offered its employees no stake in owning the business. At one level, this was justified as maintaining the balance of ownership between two 50/50 JV partners (I could think of an easy way around this "hurdle", but they never expressed much desire). But on another (retrospective) level, it is pretty incomprehensible to me that I spent 11 years and had no ownership; no partnership; no dividend; no control or voice in the business beyond my daily contribution in my niche in the org chart. No one held me down and made me stay, and plenty of people have no voice in their company, so it really wasn't and isn't enough for me to just whine about it.
I did my MBA research on the benefits of employee ownership (EO). They seem pretty obvious - the alignment of goals between the shareholders and the employees. If you are working for yourself, even in part, you have a much greater interest in the success of your company (there's probably a percentage below which it remains a matter of "ho-hum"). One of the most inspirational books I've read in this light is Andy Law's Open Minds (out of stock). I see that Law has a new book coming out early next year. Seems worth a read from here.
When I joined my present company, I made a commitment to myself that I would try (eventually) to own my job. No, we're not an EO company, and I'm not suggesting I have any control or suchlike. I am just keen to own the portion of the company that equates to my own position (=number of shares divided by number of employees, if you're a real egalitarian). I'm trying to receive the benefit of my participation in the company - share price and dividend. It's personal; it's financial; it's enlightened capitalism and all that.
Even in worker cooperatives, generally the employees have to buy their stakes - it creates a market for those who are already inside the company, and puts a value on their accumulated equity - when they hand it down to the next generation, they cash out, and the next guy buys his job (probably over the course of his own career).
By my reckoning, I'm up to owning about 15% of my job.
The ageing, bespectacled owner gave us precise directions; to talk of Benjamin was obviously a pleasure for him. Avenida del General Mola has been rebaptised Carrer del Mar. No 5 had, indeed, been renamed the Restaurant Internacional, before the business closed altogether and the blinds came down. The entire four-storey building (in Benjamin's day it had only three floors) is now uninhabited. There is no plaque, but a painted sign reads 'Bar Restaurante Casa Alejandro Especialidad de Paella', flanked by a smaller, foursquare plastic-and-metal sign that projects on to the street with the words 'Restaurant Internacional' and proclaims the virtues of a beverage called Fanta. We entered a small general store two doors down; the shopkeeper confirmed that this was indeed the former Hotel de Francia. Carefully and respectfully, we photographed No 5 - the peeling ochre paint of its façade, the rusting balcony on the fateful second floor. (from Christopher Rollason's article at wbenjamin.org)
Ivan Illich, a onetime Roman Catholic priest who, through a steady flow of books and articles preached counterintuitive sociology to a disquieted baby-boom generation, died on Monday at his home in Bremen, Germany. He was 76. (From the New York Times obituary).
[Update: new source for obit, now in NYT archive]
DARE: Why does your film have no language?
REGGIO: It's not that I don't appreciate or feel the significance of words, it's just that language has become a technology. It's no longer the bearer of meaning but covered with cultural baggage so it blinds us to the realities we're dealing with. To produce a piece devoid of language increases the richness of suggestion and effective impact, the ability to concentrate outside of the linear processes of our trained minds, offers the opportunity of a deep inspirational experience. It can make us feel alive.
[Update: original link broken - new source Disinfotainment Today]
I'm back to my regular reading, Zeno's Conscience, by Italo Svevo. My reading this year has been greatly curtailed relative to years past. I can offer three reasons:
1) Portuguese - we have Portuguese lessons two nights per week, and I spend (too little) time working on it outside of lessons. On our just-completed holidays, I actually read and understood an entire 300-page book in Portuguese. I won't name names, as it was written by my teacher, whose privacy I will protect, but I will say that it was a "real" book, published by one of Brazil's big publishers. I probably cruised along at >90% comprehension, and when I didn't know a word, I skipped over, rather than looking up, or tried to work it out solely from context. I left the looking-up as an exercise for later.
2) Commuting - since we moved to Brazil, I have been driving to work. For the past 5 years, my commuting was more regularly by train, with only occasional driving. This makes a difference of about 4 hours per week of reading time (and about 10 miles per week of walking, which I also notice). Sometimes I listen to the radio while I am driving to work (see #1, above), but I am always aware of what dead time this is relative to taking the train.
3) Fernando Pessoa - I made the 'mistake' of making The Book of Disquiet my primary reading, starting in September. I have read about 100 pages of this 'factless biography', but it isn't the kind of book you can just get lost in for hours. Any evening I took this one up, it was pretty much 'lights out' for me five minutes later. So I put it on the back burner and moved on to Svevo, which I am halfway through. It may be that this is the last book I make it through this year. It's not that I don't enjoy the Pessoa - I find in it a very tangible saudade and world-weariness that resonates in me - a lost-world sense of longing like that I found in WG Sebald's Austerlitz. I just need to take it in small doses.
It is hard to get into the mood for Christmas in the middle of summer. We strung some fairy lights in our palm tree last night. We started our advent calendars and opened my mother's pre-Christmas gift to the baby. It was a version of the Nutcracker story, complete with CD. It's nice to have it well in advance of Christmas, so you can justify playing it a lot. As popular and probably overplayed as it is, I still love the music and it reminds me of my own childhood Christmasses.
We are back from our holidays. We spent six days on Fernando de Noronha, an archipelago off the northeast coast of Brazil. It is a wild and little-developed place with spectacular beaches and ocean life. There are so few tourists that you can have one of Brazil's most beautiful beaches to yourself.
After Noronha, we spent three days in Rio, which is probably the most beautiful city in the world, warts and all. A definite highlight was sitting on the curb outside the "Garota de Ipanema" bar, where the song was written, drinking cheap chopp and talking with some folks who lived across the street about how Rio was better than any other city in Brazil until the very small hours of the morning (while my mother-in-law babysat). If sitting in the cafe is a very touristy thing to do, getting a beer to take away and sitting on the street seems very local. Everyone says we should go back for New Year.