MMXII In Books, Or, Blockquote-O-Rama
Hello.
I read some books this last year (I did!) and I will shortly tell you about them. But, due to my long absence which I am not even going to get into, would you be so kind as to tell me Important Things that may have happened to you while I was away? There apparently is an entry cut-off date for backlogs. Births, deaths, marriages, divorces, disposal of incriminating evidence, that sort of thing; I will be discreet, I promise.
She says to the internet.
If I remember correctly, I promised you some quotes about a 16th century Venetian cartographer last time? Here follows what I managed to squeeze into Twitter, and some of what I was saving for a proper blog entry.
Venice! This lagoon of soupy canals, cats' pee, and pageants.
That is undoubtedly the most accurate description of Venice that ever was. I remember at some point I had been collecting non-romanticized descriptions of Venice and now I think I can stop. We have found the pinnacle of tourism write-ups from Fra Mauro, the only possible thing that is missing is a description of the size of Venetian rats. I should put it on a poster. On a less smelly note:
"Through the use of words and vague coastlines, the two of us had attempted to give form to something not of this world."
"This is the world I have chosen to describe: an old earth populated by strange wonders and mysterious creatures."
"I ask myself whether this is how the world changes, how it realizes itself anew-not as a shifting planet in the heavens, but as a conjunction of thought in space."
"Such a map would include how people experience their country, and how they exact from it a measure of well-being."
"They have journeyed to Venice, to this monastery, from so many distant places in order to share with me the purest of all deceptions-that of their own willingness to be entranced."
- Fra Mauro (trans. James Cowan), A Mapmaker's Dream
Also: Sixteenth Century Wallabies, A Brief Footnote In Passing:
While waiting to take ship in various Oriental ports, he was able to learn about the legendary South Land of Lochac that I mentioned earlier. Sailors and Macassan fishermen, some of whom had ventured ashore on its inhospitable coast, spoke of it as a place where no civilized being could survive. If it was not inhabited by one-footed men, then other stories suggested that a race of dark people lived there who embraced nudity as a substitute for clothing.
[...]
"[a shipwrecked Dutch sailor] discovered that the natives used their bodies as veritable spirit maps on which they used to draw the place where they had been conceived. These people expressed the land in which they lived as symbols daubed all over their bodies."
Fra Campeggio's remarks caught me by surprise. The idea of a body map had not occurred to me before. Rather than carrying about with them an elaborate piece of parchment detailing the earth's contours and coastlines, the natives had chosen to use their own bodies to express what they had discovered about their homeland. They had made their bodies a projection of their world.
- Fra Mauro (trans. James Cowan), A Mapmaker's Dream
The history of European travelers interacting with Australian aboriginals is fraught, to say the least. But I thought that this was a particularly lovely excerpt exploring a different philosophical concept from a different people. And as we all know, giant, hopping one-footed men is 16th century code for wallabies and kangaroos. I . . . I am not ashamed to say I would give an awful lot to hear a contemporary description of drop bears. Or really, any of Australia's native fauna.
And now, onwards, to books!
Library : Fiction
Library : Uncompleted
Home : Fiction
Home : Non-Fiction
Home : Uncompleted
Reading-material-wise, I have definitely skewed to the philosophical and the meditative, filled out with comfort reads. This was the year that I stopped going to the library because I associated it too strongly with the misery of jury duty (the book list reflects this point, starkly). The same for Italo Calvino's Numbers in the Dark (I am most of the way through it & I may have to resign myself to never finishing it because I cannot stress how traumatic jury duty really was). This was the year that I discovered Angela Carter properly (and you wonder why you don't hear about her when you were younger, and then you remember her unflinching explorations of dark, hidden things and then you realize why). This was the year that I read a truly awful book just for the ability to mock it in realtime on Twitter (All The Tropes! Every Last One Of Them!) This was the year that I did a rare bookshelf purge for
roadrunnertwice (may he have joy of them, or lolz at least).
This was the year when I concussed myself on my nightstand as I was rolling over at 6:00 am, and my nightstand is a Victorian steamer trunk with iron corner caps. Unforgiving iron corner caps. The upshot is that my room needs to be rearranged so that I can retain my fine motor skills, which means that 2013 will be The Year of MOAR BOOKSHELVES and LESS BOOK ZIGGURATS. Hurrah.
So. How are you? Did you read things? Will you tell me what they are?
This entry was originally posted at http://chronographia.dreamwidth.org/92795.html and has
comments. Please comment there using OpenID.
I read some books this last year (I did!) and I will shortly tell you about them. But, due to my long absence which I am not even going to get into, would you be so kind as to tell me Important Things that may have happened to you while I was away? There apparently is an entry cut-off date for backlogs. Births, deaths, marriages, divorces, disposal of incriminating evidence, that sort of thing; I will be discreet, I promise.
She says to the internet.
If I remember correctly, I promised you some quotes about a 16th century Venetian cartographer last time? Here follows what I managed to squeeze into Twitter, and some of what I was saving for a proper blog entry.
Venice! This lagoon of soupy canals, cats' pee, and pageants.
That is undoubtedly the most accurate description of Venice that ever was. I remember at some point I had been collecting non-romanticized descriptions of Venice and now I think I can stop. We have found the pinnacle of tourism write-ups from Fra Mauro, the only possible thing that is missing is a description of the size of Venetian rats. I should put it on a poster. On a less smelly note:
"Through the use of words and vague coastlines, the two of us had attempted to give form to something not of this world."
"This is the world I have chosen to describe: an old earth populated by strange wonders and mysterious creatures."
"I ask myself whether this is how the world changes, how it realizes itself anew-not as a shifting planet in the heavens, but as a conjunction of thought in space."
"Such a map would include how people experience their country, and how they exact from it a measure of well-being."
"They have journeyed to Venice, to this monastery, from so many distant places in order to share with me the purest of all deceptions-that of their own willingness to be entranced."
- Fra Mauro (trans. James Cowan), A Mapmaker's Dream
Also: Sixteenth Century Wallabies, A Brief Footnote In Passing:
While waiting to take ship in various Oriental ports, he was able to learn about the legendary South Land of Lochac that I mentioned earlier. Sailors and Macassan fishermen, some of whom had ventured ashore on its inhospitable coast, spoke of it as a place where no civilized being could survive. If it was not inhabited by one-footed men, then other stories suggested that a race of dark people lived there who embraced nudity as a substitute for clothing.
[...]
"[a shipwrecked Dutch sailor] discovered that the natives used their bodies as veritable spirit maps on which they used to draw the place where they had been conceived. These people expressed the land in which they lived as symbols daubed all over their bodies."
Fra Campeggio's remarks caught me by surprise. The idea of a body map had not occurred to me before. Rather than carrying about with them an elaborate piece of parchment detailing the earth's contours and coastlines, the natives had chosen to use their own bodies to express what they had discovered about their homeland. They had made their bodies a projection of their world.
- Fra Mauro (trans. James Cowan), A Mapmaker's Dream
The history of European travelers interacting with Australian aboriginals is fraught, to say the least. But I thought that this was a particularly lovely excerpt exploring a different philosophical concept from a different people. And as we all know, giant, hopping one-footed men is 16th century code for wallabies and kangaroos. I . . . I am not ashamed to say I would give an awful lot to hear a contemporary description of drop bears. Or really, any of Australia's native fauna.
And now, onwards, to books!
Library : Fiction
- The Eye Affair - Jasper Fforde
Library : Uncompleted
- The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life - Twyla Tharp
Home : Fiction
- No Earthly Sunne - Margaret Ball
- Lost in Translation - Margaret Ball
- The Forgetting Room - Nick Bantock
- The Museum at Purgatory - Nick Bantock
- The Venetian's Wife - Nick Bantock
- Sleight of Hand - Peter S. Beagle
- Daughter of Magic - C. Dale Brittain
- Black Venus - Angela Carter
- The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories - Angela Carter
- The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
- Court of the Air - Stephen Hunt
- The Man With the Knives - Ellen Kushner
- Swordspoint - Ellen Kushner
- Thomas the Rhymer - Ellen Kushner
- The Farthest Shore - Ursula K. Le Guin
- Feet of Clay - Terry Pratchett
- The Fifth Elephant - Terry Pratchett
- Guards, Guards! - Terry Pratchett
- Jingo - Terry Pratchett
- Men At Arms - Terry Pratchett
- Night Watch - Terry Pratchett
- Snuff - Terry Pratchett
- Thud! - Terry Pratchett
- Magic Below Stairs - Caroline Stevermer
Home : Non-Fiction
- A Mapmaker’s Dream: The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice - James Cowan
- Li: Dynamic Form in Nature - David Wade
Home : Uncompleted
- Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino
- The Magic Mirror of M. C. Escher - Bruno Ernst
- The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet - Reif Larsen
Reading-material-wise, I have definitely skewed to the philosophical and the meditative, filled out with comfort reads. This was the year that I stopped going to the library because I associated it too strongly with the misery of jury duty (the book list reflects this point, starkly). The same for Italo Calvino's Numbers in the Dark (I am most of the way through it & I may have to resign myself to never finishing it because I cannot stress how traumatic jury duty really was). This was the year that I discovered Angela Carter properly (and you wonder why you don't hear about her when you were younger, and then you remember her unflinching explorations of dark, hidden things and then you realize why). This was the year that I read a truly awful book just for the ability to mock it in realtime on Twitter (All The Tropes! Every Last One Of Them!) This was the year that I did a rare bookshelf purge for
roadrunnertwice (may he have joy of them, or lolz at least).
This was the year when I concussed myself on my nightstand as I was rolling over at 6:00 am, and my nightstand is a Victorian steamer trunk with iron corner caps. Unforgiving iron corner caps. The upshot is that my room needs to be rearranged so that I can retain my fine motor skills, which means that 2013 will be The Year of MOAR BOOKSHELVES and LESS BOOK ZIGGURATS. Hurrah.
So. How are you? Did you read things? Will you tell me what they are?
This entry was originally posted at http://chronographia.dreamwidth.org/92795.html and has
comments. Please comment there using OpenID.