QOTD: monkeys vs robots, wrt truth/logic
“That clear response, shorn of the ambiguities of presumption or prudence, would be the one given by a computer or a calculator and would be the only one that their inflexible, honest natures, that of the computer and the machine, would have allowed themselves, but we are dealing here with human beings, and human beings are known universally as the only animals capable of lying, and while it is true that they sometimes lie out of fear and sometimes out of self-interest, they also occasionally lie because they realize, just in time, that this is the only means available to them of defending the truth.”
– Jose Saramago, Seeing
Filed in QOTD, tv, books and movies | Tagged with saramago | Comments (3)RIP Jose Saramago
my eyes teared when i read this obituary this morning: Nobel Prize-Winning Writer Saramago Dead at 87.
From the 1980s Saramago was one of Portugal’s best-selling contemporary writers and his works have been translated into more than 20 languages.
But he never courted the kind of fame offered by literary prizes and his bluntness could sometimes offend.
”I am skeptical, reserved, I don’t gush, I don’t go around smiling, hugging people and trying to make friends,” he once said.
His outspokenness set off a storm of protest in 2002 when during a visit he compared Ramallah, a Palestinian city blockaded at the time by the Israeli army, to the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Holocaust survivors and intellectuals, including left-wing doves who were highly critical of the Israeli government’s policy toward the Palestinians, condemned Saramago’s statement as false and anti-Semitic.
In 1998 he said his book ”Blindness” was about ”a blindness of rationality.” In that book, which was made into a 2008 movie starring Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore, the population of an unnamed city is struck by a mysterious blindness which is never explained. Society’s fragilities come to the fore as a general breakdown of infrastructures ensues.
”We’re rational beings but we don’t behave rationally. If we did, there’d be no starvation in the world,” he said.
Such compassion and anxiety about the skewing of priorities in modern society is evident in all his works and also gives a clue to his enduring sympathy toward the Communist Party.
He was frequently compared with Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his writing is often described as realism tinged with Latin-American mysticism, particularly for his technique of confronting historical personages with fictional characters.
Portuguese critic Torcato Sepulveda said Saramago successfully ”sought to reconcile the rationalism of his materialistic world view with the richness of his baroque style.”
Others disagreed, saying Saramago was too intellectual and that his storytelling pace often slowed to a dreary plod, or that his sparing use of punctuation and speech marks confused the reader.
Saramago had a remedy: ”I tell them to read my books out loud and then they’ll pick up the rhythm, because this is ‘written orality.’ It is the written version of the way people tell stories to each other,” he said.
i cannot recommend this man’s works enough. “Blindness
RIP to my favorite author, and thank you for all that you gave to the world. he was a prime example of the provocative thinker and reason for art: if what you are doing causes no one to question, then why do it?
Filed in tv, books and movies | Tagged with saramago | Comment (0)female + fiction
this morning i didn’t go to work because it was super sunny and friday i was in too much pain and so i drank my coffee, took some pain meds and went to sit in the garden and read my book until the pain meds kicked in. and then when i came back inside i was sort of hypercaffeinated/doped up and got into unconscious multi-tasking mode (where you do numbers of things at once even though you’re not in any kind of hurry whatsoever) and almost took a banana into the shower (tweet).
if there’s one plus side to all this pain management it’s that i’m spending lots more time reading in the garden, which is nice because i no longer have public transportation time for reading since they cancelled my AC Transit bus line to work. i also get most of my exercise biking to work now, which is good because i haven’t actually gone to the gym very much at all lately and my bike commute is pretty much the only daily exercise i’m getting. (tweeted side note: yesterday on the way home i got pulled over by the emeryville police for blowing a stop sign on my bike. i have never even been pulled over while driving my CAR in california. i pleaded ignorance and apologized and was let off with a warning.)
anyway, i finished the book – The Anxiety of Everyday Objects
i’m not sure why i read 3 books in a row on such a similar theme. obviously i am still figuring out “who i am” (always, a neverending inner monologue), and questions about female identity in this modern world are on the forefront of culture right now, what with 2 women taking over the political headlines combined/contrasted with all the plastic surgery/airbrushing/extreme dieting/female imagery and the commentary on that subject in pop culture. it makes sense women (or maybe just me) are discombobulated. in the past i’ve not been regularly drawn to books on this subject, but my fiction choices of late have shown that it’s on my mind a lot more than maybe i was aware of.
because i now needed a new book and to change pace, today i went to “The West’s Oldest Independent Bookseller” and one of the only local bookstores left in Berkeley – Books, Inc. on 4th street- and bought Seeing
Saramago’s sombre masterpiece “Blindness” had an almost mythic power, whereas his latest novel, a political satire set in the same nameless capital city, opens with more wit and less heart. When Election Day coincides with a terrible rainstorm, the government worries that no one will venture out to vote. This fear is unfounded, but the election results are even more alarming: seventy per cent of the city’s voters have cast a blank ballot. Saramago has enormous fun imagining the official acrobatics precipitated by this apparent vote of no confidence, and, as the political hypocrisies and bureaucratic absurdities multiply, the narrative hums with correspondences to current events. Initially, readers may miss the previous novel’s intensity of feeling, but this one’s lightness proves deceptive: for Saramago’s beleaguered citizens, even thoughts never uttered can be fatal, and everyone is guilty until otherwise notified.
looking forward to it.
Filed in tv, books and movies | Tagged with pain management, saramago | Comment (1)recently read
i mentioned that i’d read several great books lately, and so here’s a little about them:
i already discussed A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius but i’m still going to recommend it one more time. while i’m not sure about the genius part, it was heartbreaking as well as thoroughly entertaining in both form and content for me as a Gen Xer in SF, CA.
then i read The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis, mostly because the film was coming out and I wanted to read the book first. i was a little bored with the content and style, as both the disaffection and ennui of the rich and bourgeois and graphic physical violence have been aspects of his previous work (Less Than Zero, American Psycho), but it’s still well-written (and short) enough to have kept me reading. i’m interested in seeing hollywood’s treatment of the subplot revealed in the end, given the actors cast in the film as well as current trends in the genre.
then i read Jose Saramago’s new book, Death With Interruptions. two of his previous books rank in my top 10: Blindness was one of the most intense novels i’ve ever read (and i’ve yet to see the film because i loved the book so much), and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was just truly beautiful and amazing and i wish i could buy everyone i know a copy. I also read The Double, but for some reason didn’t enjoy the content of that as much as these other three. his style of writing and storytelling is enthralling and unique, and i think that Death with Interruptions showcases his talent as a wordsmith the best yet. i was dogearring pages left and right and stopping to savor his wry use of words. while the topic is mildly political in the current context of “death panels” in amercia, i read it as nothing other than a fast and furious fictional treatment of one of life’s most enigmatic human questions: would life be better if we were immortal? is death a curse, or a blessing?
having run out of books to read on the trip then, i bought one of the few english language novels at the airport in Amsterdam before the flight back: Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father (the one that unabashedly details his younger years, with ancecdotes that some chose to use as ammunition during the election, like his occasional use of drugs as a student, incidents involving racial dynamics, and the use of language like the Fword, none of which, for me, affect your ability to be President.) i’m sort of ashamed that i probably would never have purchased this book if it weren’t because it was one of the few in English (limited choice), and then once i started reading it, even more ashamed that i knew so little about a president i voted for. i’ve been pleasantly surprised at, first of all, how incredibly well-written it is, and then secondly, how much i relate to his story and worldview. i didn’t think i had a lot in common with a black christian ivy league politician, but apparently i do, and i have to say i’m enjoying it very much and would recommend it to anyone, especially people like me who may not know as much about Obama as we should. whether you voted for him or not, and whether you like him now or not, it’s a well written autobiographical novel and hey, he is the President.
finally, we saw Where the Wild Things Are yesterday, and i was pleasantly surprised there also with how much different the film was than i somehow expected it to be. with Dave Eggers as a writer (and if you’ve read his books, like the one mentioned above, then you quickly hear his voice in the script) and Spike Jonze as director i knew it was going to be different, but it wasn’t what i expected. the original story is only 10 sentences, so to make a feature length film you have to make up a lot about character and plot, but unlike children’s stories like Alice in Wonderland or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or The Wizard of Oz or Brothers Grimm tales that have obvious dark sides to the original written works that were carefully reframed or edited out in the filmmaking for young audiences (Disneyfication), WTWTA goes the other way and takes a rather innocuous children’s tale and turns it into something much deeper, much weirder, and much darker than the original to the point that i don’t think it is even a children’s movie anymore. i think i expected something more like when they’ve taken short Dr. Seuss books and turned them into feature length films, adding silly adventures and subplots to the existing look and feel. i love it when children’s movies center on adult themes (and Pixar has been a leader in that, with Wall-E and UP), but i think this goes beyond even that, which was surprising and interesting. we went to an early show, and so the theatre was largely full of families with children, and i don’t think many of the smaller children got the movie at all, although the 10/11 year old boy next to me was crying, so for older kids it might mean a lot. and, definitely a movie to see in the theatre, as visually it is stunning.
Filed in tv, books and movies | Tagged with eggers, saramago | Comment (1)touch me touch me jesus.
it’s not really that big of coincidence but it felt weird at the moment.
i finished reading the gospel according to jesus christ, by the portuguese author jose saramago, the nobel prize winner who also wrote blindness, a novel that also blew me away and moved me deeply. he’s right on par with (though not as widely published as) Huxley, i would say, and in fact after finishing the gospel i started reading island. the gospel is one of the best books i’ve ever read, by far. so good that when i got to about the last 30 pages, i put it down for a couple of days becuase i just didn’t want it to end. well, i mean – we all know how the story “ends”, but given how the rest of jesus’ life was portrayed in the book i wasn’t sure how the final acts would play out. the book is poetically written in a flowing narrative with few paragraph breaks and little formality in terms of format – no use of quotes for speakers, verb tenses and point-of-view switching mid thought. a style to get used to, for sure, but fitting, in that it seems like narrator is so caught up in telling the story that there’s not time for such formalities. that’s how it reads. a historically detailed, patient, yet revealing and exciting recounting of the full life of jesus christ – not just those “passion of the christ” hours – including his “coming of age” period, his time spent wandering the deserts homeless and alone, his affair with mary magdalene, his relationships with the apostles, the miracles, and, importantly, the overall lifestyle and values held by his family and community under Roman occupation and law.
however, it’s not just a historical retelling – God and Satan appear as brilliantly formed characters and the supernatural is present, and there are several passages with direct one-to-one conversations between Jesus and God in which the questions about life, God, and the universe are discussed (but not necessarily answered) in a very Socratic way, and one three way conversation between Jesus, God, and Satan that made clear the inherent contradictions in the theories of Good and Evil, Fate and Free Will.
that said, i obviously highly recommend the book. the last line was one of the best last lines i’ve ever read, and it actually made me lose my breath for a second.
**
this morning i got a note from someone on tribe about making burning man costumes for people. i’ve been wanting to learn to sew but haven’t actually attempted yet, and so i need to find someone else to do it for this year. i told her i wanted a costume like the white ones the go-go dancers wear near the end of Jesus Christ Superstar when Judas comes back from the dead to sing.
i’ve noted before the (some would say idolatrous) similarities in concept between Burning Man and Jesus Christ Superstar – a group of artists/counterculturalists going into the desert to recreate a city and a cultural event, and at the end of the event, The Man is crucified/burned.
i would venture to say that it’s quite possibly more true now than ever: we have no king but caesar.
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