Book Review: Hecate & Her Dogs by Paul Morand

I reviewed this book for the RCF. 300 words or less is about my speed these days.

Book Review: Or, a blurb for S P R A W L by Danielle Dutton

While walking those safe and sterile streets at night and crossing my neighbors' perfect lawns, I felt—or maybe assumed—that their whole world was empty and that nothing was going on even in the minds of the people inside their homes. While living there I was always comforted by the idea that the lives of neighbors were as empty as they seemed. But Dutton has filled all of the supposed emptiness of suburbia with a flood of thought and feeling. Her protagonist's powerful stream of consciousness peeks inward and outward, bringing her marriage, her world, and herself in powerfully shifting focus, as if she was passing everything around her under a microscope for the span of a second. This is a truly disturbing book . . . and it makes me damn nervous.

Guess what was originally in the ellipsis.

Movies watched this month, starting this morning and going backward

Europa Europa
The Men Who Stare at Goats
Three Days of the Condor
The Big Sleep
The Godfather: Part II
The Matrix Revolutions
Defiance
Good Will Hunting
Searching for Bobby Fischer
La Moustache
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Archangel (BBC miniseries)

It's late and I am on the Internet, reading things.

A sampling from each of my open windows:

In Zionism's case, the story told is of Israel restored to the Jews from antiquity, carved from empty desert, "a land without a people for a people without a land". By extension, Arab hostility to Israel's creation was irrational cruelty directed against an infant state.

It is a romantic myth requiring a big lie about the indigenous Palestinian population.

Langurs are a common type on monkey in south Asia, and because they are large and fierce they are often used in India to keep other monkeys in check in public places.

There has never been an Arab leader in contemporary Arab history who was as capable of moving the Arab street or shaping Arab political thought as Nasser.

For many, then and today, Nasser personified anti-colonialist, modern Arab political thought and that made him one of the most influential world leaders of his time. His advocacy of Arab independence and support for revolutionary movements around the world placed him and the Arab world at the forefront of representing the emerging countries of the South against an imperialist North.

The undeniable reality is that the work becomes the translator’s (while simultaneously and mysteriously somehow remaining the work of the original author) as we transmute it into a second language. Perhaps transmute is the wrong verb; what we do is not an act of magic, like altering base metals into precious ones, but the result of a series of creative decisions and imaginative acts of criticism.

As far as I know, the most perfect gentleman in literature is Charles Swann. The son of a stockbroker, Swann is equally at home with his father’s bourgeois neighbors, with seedy bohemians, or with the Prince of Wales. None of whom know about the other worlds through which he moves. Swann, a Jew, is somehow more aristocratic than any aristocrat. Alone among Proust’s male characters, he is free of snobbery. He has beautiful manners. He is a friend to all men.

I wasn’t there, but I assume that he was referring to untranslated words like insha’allah, masha’allah, jihad, madrassa and so on. And indeed, this subtle definition by “un-translation” that seems to create new (and sometimes nefarious) meanings. Insha’allah becomes something that connotes laziness. Jihad connotes some absurd “clash of the civilizations.”

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