January 2012
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Exposing Yourself to Foreign Experiences
This morning, Mrs. Tragos, Baby Tragos and I headed down to a big indoor mall in Ankara. It was time to get some more serious toys for Baby Tragos. It was also time for Mrs. Tragos to get a haircut.
While Mrs. Tragos sat down for the above-mentioned haircut, I took Baby Tragos for a walk around the mall. Normally, I would put her facing out in the Baby Bjorn, which she loves. She gets to...
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“I believe that literature must address itself to the problems of its time. An...”
– Mario Vargas Llosa, from the May 20, 1997 issue of Prospect Magazine, in an article that directly addresses the question (posed in the subtitle), “Does literature serve any higher purpose beyond entertainment?”
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“A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses it to come to a...”
– Alain de Botton on false standards and reclaiming the metrics of success. (via curiositycounts)
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“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
– Albert Camus (via gill-man)
A Tragos favorite, for its skeptical pessimism. The quote is from The Rebel.
The following sentence is:
“The question is: do we know if this refusal can only lead to the destruction of others and of himself…”
— L’Homme révolté,...
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Ms. Odradek: Life, Literaturized! →
Oh! l’unica parte importante della vita è il raccoglimento. Quando tutti lo comprenderanno con la chiarezza ch’io ho tutti scriveranno. La vita sarà letteraturizzata. Metà dell’umanità sarà dedicata a leggere e studiare quello che l’altra metà avrà annotato. E il raccoglimento occuperà il…
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“I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of...”
– Einstein to Thornton, 7 December 1944 (via superfluidity)
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night rpm: Fragment as Art →
noxrpm:
Sappho’s Fragment 137, from If Not, Winter - Fragments of Sappho (tr. Anne Carson) -
I want to say something but shame prevents me … yet if you had a desire for good or beautiful things and your tongue were not concocting some evil to say, shame would not hold down your eyes but…
Nox RPM doesn’t post often, but when he does, I always take notice. He has a masterly way...
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“The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good - in spite...”
– Robert Graves
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“Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at...”
– A curse issued by a medieval German monastery to scare away humanist bibliophiles, as quoted by Stephen Greenblatt in his wonderful book about the reception history of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.
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“He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the...”
– Dostoevsky writing about having met Charles Dickens in London in 1862, as quoted by Christopher Hitchens in his last article for Vanity Fair.
[Edit: That very well might be spurious.]
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“…all philosophy is an act of language. Rhythm, vocabulary, syntax, everything...”
– From an interview with George Steiner, “Europe is in the Act of Sacrificing its Young,” in Télérama.fr, December 12, 2011, trans. mine
[“…toute philosophie est un acte de langage. Le rythme, le vocabulaire, la syntaxe, tout ce qui nous conduit vers la poésie, nous le...
December 2011
19 posts
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Mr. Janus, You Rascal
…New Year’s Eve, 2011…
I began 2011 without a clue. After a chaotic New Year’s Eve day, in which a conversation with a very interesting Turk in Istanbul nearly caused us to not cross the Bosporus in time to get our flight to London. (As Mrs. Tragos might tell you, I have a tendency to get lost—very lost—in conversations.) We made it, just in time for me to kiss...
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“What philosophy worthy of the name has truly been able to avoid the link between...”
– Michel Serres (from Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time)
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“Greene’s “dual-process theory” of moral decision-making posits that rationality...”
– The Biology of Right and Wrong (via theatlantic)
What disturbs me is that I’ve never learned to use the manual mode of any camera I’ve ever used.
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“Those first years when you can’t blow your own nose, when your father picked you...”
– A.A. Gill, “Fatherhood” - from Is Further Away (via winesburgohio)
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“There should be pride in it, that you behaved no worse. There should be...”
– Clive James, discussing the cycling of generations and Gabriel García Márquez’s notion of a patriarch’s autumn. Brought to my attention by Salman Rushdie’s Twitter.
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“To put this as crisply as I can, the study of the classics is the study of what...”
– Mary Beard, “Do the Classics Have a Future?”, in the New York Review of Books. (via thebronzemedal)
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Il tuo primo (primissimo) Natale ad Ankara | No... →
The incredible Byronic invited to me to recount my Christmas adventures in Ankara last year for No Borders Magazine.
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“Generalmente, esa sensación de una absoluta soledad aparece mezclada a un...”
– El Túnel · Ernesto Sabato (via almiranteb)
“Generally, this feeling of absolute solitude is mixed with a proud sense of superiority, of contempt for mankind. Men strike me as dirty, ugly, greedy, rude, and mean. My solitude does not scare me. It is almost Olympian.” [my transl.]
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“Arriving in each city, the traveler finds a past he did not know he had: the...”
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili, Mondadori, Milan, 2002, p. 26 - 27, my transl.)
[ “Arrivando a ogni città il viaggiatore ritrova un suo passato che non sapeva d’avere: l’estraneità di ciò che non sei più o non possiedi più aspetta al varco nei luoghi estranei...
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“We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine....”
– Leo Tolstoy discussing cinema with Isaak Teneromo in August 1908, as reported in the New York Times on January 31st 1937.
The article also reports that Tolstoy was planning to write “a play for the screen” likely to have “a terrible and bloody theme.”
I really rather wish Tolstoy had written a...
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“Todos los hombres, en algún momento de su vida, se sienten solos; y más: todos...”
– Paz, Octavio. El laberinto de la soledad (1950)
“Man is nostalgia and the search for communion. That’s why whenever man feels his own presence it feels like the absence of another, like solitude.” (via algolenguaje)
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“Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die:...”
– Vladimir Nabokov, from “Lectures on Literature” (via petitchou)
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Why Our Baby Did Not Freeze...
Action: 10pm Board overnight train from Istanbul to Ankara with my husband and baby 2 moth old girl.
Thoughts: Woohoo! We made it!
Speech: "Chris, Iona, this is awesome!"
Blankets etc: There are sheets and 2 enormous blankets on the bunks. The train compartment is toasty warm. Train conductor comes in, sees baby Iona and gives us another enormous blanket, I toss them all in the corner.
Action: 2.30am Train is stopped, Iona wakes up, chortles with delight as we're doing a diaper change.
Thoughts: We've been stopped for rather a long time, Iona's fed, when we start up again it'll be easy for her to go back to sleep. There's no way Chris can sleep through Iona's happy squeals...
Speech (Chris, sleepily): "Hey little Iona, are you wide awake?"
Speech (me): "There's quite a kerfuffle outside, Chris, there's all these train personnel in the hallway messing with the electric board."
Blankets etc: Train compartment is pretty warm but getting cooler. Electricity is out. Conductor comes in with a torch while I'm breastfeeding and gives us 2 more enormous blankets. Maybe I will need one after all...
Action: 4.30am I have moved all our blankets except the 2 for Chris onto the bunk I'm sharing with Iona. Iona's also swaddled with all her burping cloths, her snowsuit, her hat and is pressed against me.
Thoughts: Fuck I'm cold and poor little Iona's face (the only part of her exposed) is getting cold.
Speech: Groan, shiver.
Blankets etc: If I make Chris come down to our bunk then maybe we can share body heat...and those 2 extra blankets? Could we even all fit?
Thoughts: 6am Argh! It's so cold! Iona's asleep but if she wakes up or needs a diaper change how in the world can we keep her warm?
Speech: Chris! We have a problem!!! Iona's going to get really cold and our train won't get in for 2hrs...I don't know what else to do?
...Action: Chris (dressed in running shorts, T-shirt and short white socks) awakes and gets a primitive look in his eyes. He leaps from the top bunk, races outside into the freezing train compartment and down the train screaming for a train conductor. A few compartments full of frozen Chinese tourists crack open and women swaddled in parkas and blankets watch Chris race about. Chris locates a train carriage which does have electricity and a few conductors. He explains we have to move into the other compartment right now.
Blankets etc: A wagon full of people, who look more like plaid blankets than people, follow semi-clad Chris to the warm wagon.
Action: 8 am We leave our toasty compartment in the new warm wagon and head out to find a cab.
Thoughts: Mmmmm, my husband, my hero...
Speech: "Hey look Chris, all those Chinese tourists are smiling at you!"
Blankets etc: It's good to be home...
*Tragos footnotes:
** Chris = Tragos; "I"/OKImago" = Mrs. Tragos; Iona = Baby Tragos
*** The Chinese tourists, according to me, were frightened to death to see an American berserker running full speed down the train corridor. They were in parkas and I was wearing shorts. And my hair was standing up since I basically jumped off my top bunk and ran straight out our compartment.
**** When they smiled at me, I strongly suspect it was in the hope to appease the berserker soul they had witnessed early that morning.
***** My demand to change us to the new train car was probably stated in terms people would not describe as "diplomatic"
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November 2011
21 posts
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“Beckett was profoundly marked by the horrors of war and Occupation – just how...”
– Alan Jenkins, “How I dislike that play now …“, a review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume Two 1941-1956, The Times Literary Supplement, Nov 2 2011. Bold mine. Similar or somewhat related remarks found in previous posts: Daniil Kharms, J.D. Salinger & Howard Zinn. (via msodradek)
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our...”
– Mark Twain Travel Quotes (Today is Twain’s 176th Birthday Anniversary)
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