Coffee-cat.NET
Hopefully this time (more) permanently. There are still some bits and pieces need to be imported, but it’s there and it’s running. Blog is now part of the portfolio. LJ feed will be updated soon.
I might be moving out of WordPress.com to a local installation pretty… soon-ish? Basically, I’ve just purchased a friggin’ 20 GB webspace (domain transfer still in progress though), and I need to fill ‘er up. Read the rest of this entry »
Ferdydurke
by Witold Gombrowicz, 1937
translated by Eric Mosbacher
London [England] : M. Boyars, 1979
272pp
A parody of common literary forms in prewar Polish literature, in Ferdydurke a 30-year-old complacent narrator, Johnnie (who, like Gombrowicz, has also published a book called Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity), is dragged by an old, all-cultural imposing professor Pimko back to secondary school, where everyone believes him as another poseur juvenile, “inclined to pose in order to appear grown up”. Absurdism of pomposity, immaturity, posed masks, unapologetic mysogyny, with short stories about Philifor and Philimor Honeycombed with Childishness inserted in the middle, Gombrowicz presents a madcap comic parody with intense underlying analysis of the way the externals shape one’s (re)actions. Read the rest of this entry »
The Monkey’s Wrench
by Primo Levi
translated from the Italian by William Weaver
Penguin Classics; Reprint edition (July 1, 1995)
Narrative is contained within another narrative in this novel, as Faussone, an exuberant rigger, tells his stories of working to a chemist-writer narrator (no doubt Levi’s alter ego):his constructions, an adventurous monkey, a machine that caught stardust, a name gone wrong, overcoming the fear of water, from India, Russia to Alaska.
Lumumba
directed by Raoul Peck, 2002
“This film is not an ‘adaptation,’ it aims to be a true story. I want to extract the cinematic narrative from reality by remaining as true to the facts as possible,” so said Raoul Peck. Using archival images of official history (many of film’s pivotal scenes are moving recreations of famous still photographs and newsreel footage from Lumumba’s short political life and assassination), Peck crafted a documentary-style recreation and meditation for what might have been in the events surrounding Lumumba’s assasination. Read the rest of this entry »
Under the Glacier
by Halldór Laxness
translated from the Icelandic by Magnus Magnusson
Vintage (March 8, 2005)
A young, unnamed emissary is dispatched by the Bishop of Iceland “to conduct the most important investigation at that world-famous mountain since the days of Jules Verne”, i.e. to investigate Kristinihald undir Jökli (the original title which literally translated means Christianity under the Glacier) and the strange going-ons in Snæffels glacier. Read the rest of this entry »
Um, crack, possible brain-damage alert. Because I keep my promises, one step at a time.
I know, I’ve been sodding out irksome book/film review, but I was trying to trickle some Amazon’s cash my way as either way I hardly know where to begin untangling my jumbled, knotty (but essentially very sheltered) real life.
Anyway, if you’d like to skip the ostentatious review trites and get on with the juicy (?) gossips of German opera zombie dragon, Gondwana beasts, Superman and whatnot, the password is [removed]. Now that I’ve shown you mine, show me yours.
There.
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