(Thanks Shannon for the pic.)

This seems to have come from engrish and if you have a peek over there you will find some howlers. Many of them have a sexual component almost certainly not intended by the product’s or service’s advertiser.  It makes me wonder what those fortune cookies really say. But really, isn’t that the real power of language and its relationship to meaning construction. All of a sudden what is visible are some of the deep webs which bind words together with the fine thread of categorical relationships and it makes you look around for other previously invisible things. If you think about the words “poisonous” and “rubbish” you can see how they really do fit together and if you work at it even a little you can stagger backwards into meaning-folds of the original language and take a guess at how “poisonous” is used more generally.  In other words, it gives us a glimpse of the connotations of “poisonous” in another’s context and by doing that, it makes temporarily visible our own contexts. It’s the difference, the dissonance, between the two that makes this funny.

Now that I find interesting.

My copy of L’élégance du hérisson by Muriel Barbery came last night.  I am so excited. It is going to be very hard going for me, especially at first, to read it in French, but that fact, along with how much I love the book, is what is going to make the process fun. (Part of me finds that really weird.)

Maybe that’s why I keep banging my head against philosophy. Same combo. It’s really hard to get my head around some of the ideas that must seem so very logical to those who perpetrated them on history, but I just can’t get there without really, really hard work.  Someone I have been emailing with recently said that this is, in part, because I don’t share the same cultural assumptions as those writers/thinkers. I suppose that’s what makes it hard work, because to understand, one must first unearth one’s own assumptions, and, if not uproot them, at least pot them so that they can be moved about one’s intellectual garden. A must, if another (or self) is to be understood.

For me learning another language is like that. First it’s very much a chore, since I might be good at many things, but learning language is not one of them. Second, one of the things that makes reading so much fun are the connotative links that enrich words like “hedgehog.”  The thing is that the links for “hedgehog” are different than the ones for “hérisson” despite their denotative similarity. So (re) learning to read in French is like taking on a new kind of philosophy — let’s call it narrative philosophy, unless you come up with something more fitting.

Unfortunately, I can’t get started just yet. I have this ENORMOUS crunch at work that won’t let up for another 10 days or so. Hérisson will have to wait until then. Speaking of work – I’m late. Gotta go.

I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society recently. I devoured it, which as lovely as it is, didn’t take very long. I felt comforted by the book, which is odd since it is about war and the effects it has on an occupied people. I’ve been thinking about it since and wanted just to give you some idea of how I’m thinking about it, since I haven’t come to any conclusions about this.
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Generally I read poetry before bed.  It helps compose my emotions, to allow me to slide more easily into what has become increasingly difficult to attain — the restful oblivion of a long night’s sleep.  Of late though, I have been reading Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl. It’s a delightful, light book and would normally be perfect for the calm, happy state of mind that I find a doorway to the dark warm queendom that is my world out from under the control of reason and wakefulness. Reichl’s comfort with privilege, her love of the senses, her essential stability as a person, all conspire to persuade her reader’s of their capacity for the same blissful state.

At any other time, I suspect Reichel of making me deeply happy. Unfortunately, given the baleful glares and deep imprecations of my surgeon (see Dr. B, I am blaming you again!), I am unable to partake of such fare as Ms Reichl wantonly blandishes throughout her pages. Damn if I don’t end up going to bed and dreaming of drawn butter, curry sauce and cannelloni and I don’t even like cannelloni.

The lesson learned: the power of literature to move one’s imagination? No. Instead, the demonic nature of crack surgeons.

I’ve just read Elegance of the Hedgehog. This is a personal assessment of course, but I do consider it to be one of the best books I have ever read. There seems to me hardly a misstep, and the one place I can say that I argued with the text, I can’t really say it is a misstep so much as I just disagree with the conclusion reached.

I’m going to end up writing on this and surrounding subjects again I expect. There is just so much in there apart from the delightful, if sometimes grief riven, story.  There is an image that recurs: camellia on moss. The book is such a thing. A little stillness in the storm. A quiet humane voice. Not a window or a door, but, in Deleuzian terms, a fold that moves one into beauty or, more accurately, moves beauty and the reader until we co-habit.
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Sometimes not only are we not part of the conversation, sometimes we are not even on the same playing field. I think Brian O’Nolan may have felt like that as an author. When he submitted (as Flann O’Brien) The Third Policeman to his publishers it was rejected as too fantastic. The manuscript sat on his sideboard chastising him (as I think of it) for the next quarter century and during that time he told friends that enquired of its fate that the manuscript had been irretrievably lost. It wasn’t published until after his death, and now, of course, it is considered “a masterpiece.”
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I have never been able to like Faulkner. I admire much about the books I have been able to struggle through, but I always finish them feeling raw and dirty.

This time it is The Sound and the Fury. In part I reread him because he is a very important American writer, in part because because not knowing Faulkner is to miss something vital about the growth of the American psyche and intellect, but really I decided to reread The Sound and the Fury because I still can’t figure out what it is about his books that causes me such distress.
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I’ve been reading Sherman Alexie lately. I started with his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and continued on with his War Dances.  I’ve read other things before, the first being Reservation Blues and of course I’ve seen Smoke Signals. I read his work, mostly enjoy it, sometimes love it, and recognize its value both in a literary and in a social sense, but I do have problems with it. I’m going to talk about those problems but first I want to introduce another book – apparently totally unrelated – which, actually, was the genesis of this post.

The book is about Nietzsche as is called Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith. There is a review article about it here; the review is how I found out about the book by Bruce Ellis Benson. I have ordered it on the strength of the review but also because the notion of not being able to leave behind religious traditions is one I have seen first hand over and over and it was this part of the review that suddenly had me thinking of Alexie.

The article (”Was Nietzsche Pious” by Stephen N. Williams) says:
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In a class some years ago I, along with all the other students, had been asked to present on a particular piece of assigned writing. As luck would have it I was given an essay by Bruce Chatwin called “The Bey.”

Lucky, why? First, I like Chatwin’s writing. I like what he writes about and how he goes about presenting his words. Second, I knew what Bey meant and therefore had a much easier time of it than my fellow students.

Having been a student on and off for many years, I suspected that most, if not all, would read the essay but wouldn’t do the necessary investigative work to understand the world upon which Chatwin was commenting within the body of his essay. Based on this belief, I organized my presentation around the necessary details to understanding the piece. It turned out to be a correct assumption; after a successful presentation, I closed with a question to start the discussion. The question was “what is a reader’s responsibility when coming to a piece?” I was speaking to a room full of writers.

“The Bey” begins…
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Today in 1838: Emma Wedgwood and Charles Darwin became engaged. That’s what is at the core of November 11 for me. It’s the thing that holds all the rest of the pieces together.

I have a day off work today. Ostensibly this is to honor those that are dead in war. All week last week, and for the first part of this week, there have been old men in uniform with paper-covered cans and red plastic poppies camping in the corners of work-a-day high-rises quietly asking for money and to be remembered.

Here are some of the things I remember.
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