radiant fracture

My coffee spoons are 28 minutes and 42 seconds long.

Today:
Anne Carson (repeat because I missed part of it the other day due to Actual Work) (from Jan 07)
Jennifer Egan (the keep) on the gothic (Dec 06)
Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital (McSweeney's author!) (Dec 06)
Zadie Smith - On Beauty (Nov 06)
Clifford Chase - Winkie (Nov 06)
W.S. Merwin - Present Company (In tribute to Bee's love of Merwin.) (Aug 06)

So far the two authors who have really been able to match Silverblatt at his level are Anne Carson and Zadie Smith. W.S. Merwin asked *him* a question, which was delightful.

Zadie Smith: "The [contemporary] model of a reader is a person watching a movie, [rather than] an amateur musician playing this piece of music, [the novel]"

This connects for me with the problem I seem to have with recent novels which appear to engage complex ideas, but disappoint me, I think in part because they instead display a series of static moral tableaux.

I believe I completely missed that On Beauty was based on Howard's End.

* * * * * *

One of the interesting problem-solving bits of my work right now is that there are many fragments of badly-transcribed French. My French is not always good enough for reliable translation, so I supplement with an online translator, which is usually enough for job titles and things like that -- except when it isn't, or when the French text is too badly spelled or mis-punctuated to be translatable.

What pleases me is making small grammatical or spelling changes, based on my half-remembered intuitions about the language, which (on my hitting the "translate" button a second time) suddenly resolve the sentence into meaning, so that, for a simple example:

in the service of the fires of Montreal

Becomes, with a minor adjustment, what it seemed obvious it should become:

in the fire prevention service of Montreal

which is less beautiful, but more immediately purposeful. (And then "in the service of the fires of Montreal" belongs to me.)

{rf}