“But what I saw was interesting from a Translation Studies or reception-studies point of view, because what I saw was that English-language writers and critics always commented with great wonder and admiration on Borges’s themes, the subjects and philosophico-literary treatment of his stories, his playing with genres, whereas Spanish-language writers and critics, especially at the beginning of his or their career, almost invariably commented on another aspect of his work: his style, his prose, his writing itself. Not that the themes and subjects and genre play didn’t startle and waken Spanish-language readers’ imaginations, sometimes even change their lives and art — Carlos Fuentes, for instance, has spoken very movingly about the influence on him of Borges’s subjects and cultural eclecticism. But to writers and readers in Spanish, the subjects or “stuff” of the fictions was often simply not as shocking, not as disorienting, not as liberating, not as “new”, as the prose itself was. {…}
Clearly, Borges himself felt that he was doing something that he, at least, had not done before: he was purifying, streamlining his style, paring it down, trimming away the fat, bringing it out of an earlier complexity into a “plainer” mode. (Not, he said, that it was “simple”, for there was nothing simple about it; it was just not as decorative and/or shocking and relentlessly “avant-garde”). So that became one important rule for me: the prose of the translation was to be as “frugal”, as “direct”, as “restrained”, in Vargas Llosa’s words, or as tight, economical, and efficient, as I saw it, as Borges’s own prose was. As in the Spanish, every word had to carry its own weight. I had to shift gears out of the baroque of the writers I had recently been translating, Reinaldo Arenas and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, and into a taut classicism.
{…}But what I needed to guide me in the actual choices I had to make were the details of the style, and there were two things that made me aware of the most remarkable of Borges’s hallmarks: his adjectives. First there was a remarkable sentence by Borges himself in the preface to El Hacedor: “To left and right, absorbed in their waking dream, rows of readers’ momentary profiles in the light of the ‘scholarly lamps’, as a Miltonian displacement of adjectives [hypallage] would have it. I recall having recalled that trope here in the Library once before, and then that other adjective of setting — the Lunario’s ‘arid camel’, and then that hexameter from the Aeneid that employs, and surpasses, the same artifice: Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbran’”. This hypallage, as it is called in English — arid camel, scholarly lamps — was, I realized, everywhere in Borges, for it both opens and closes the fictional corpus. In the first sentence of the first “biography” in A Universal History of Iniquity (1935) we read this: “In 1517, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, feeling great pity for the Indians who grew worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines… ”, laboriosos infiernos. And at the end of his career, in one of the last fictions that he wrote, “The Rose of Paracelsus”, in the volume Shakespeare’s Memory, Borges uses this trope twice: fatigado sillón/ “weary chair”, and mano sacrílega/ “sacrilegious hand”. Thus we are presented with a stylistic trait, a fingerprint, that identifies Borges throughout his career. Other clear examples of this technique are una cicatriz rencorosa/ “a vengeful scar”, alcohol pendenciero/belligerent alcohol”, biblioteca ilegible/ “illegible library”, and dentelladas blancas y bruscas/ “brusque, white bites”.{…}
{…}The second part of my awakening to the importance of Borges’s adjectives came in that Vargas Llosa essay that I quoted a second ago. There, Vargas Llosa specifically mentions Borges’s “strikingly original use of adjectives and adverbs”. That made me realize that I had somehow to deal with the words that Spanish-language readers and commentators had puzzled over for years; I could not simply translate them into invisibility. One of the most famous opening lines in Spanish literature is this: Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche: “No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night”. What an odd adjective, “unanimous”. It is so odd, in fact, that one is sorely tempted to put something like “all-encompassing”, so as to make it “comprehensible” to the reader. But it is just as odd in Spanish, as Vargas Llosa has told us, and it clearly responds to Borges’s intention, expressed explicitly in the story “The Immortal” (which I’ll talk about in just a second), to let the Latin root govern the Spanish (and, by extension, English) usage. In “The Dead Man” there is a “splendid” woman: Her red hair glows; indeed, I believe that in Borges, splendid always has either the etymological sense of glowing or the sense only slightly metaphorized from that, of glorious. Somewhere else there are “concave” hands: cupped, of course. And there are many more “odd” examples besides. These two techniques, hypallage and etymologized adjectives and adverbs, are present throughout the entire course of Borges’s career. They are also traits he surely found and recognized in some of the English writers he most admired, and sometimes translated — Emerson and Thoreau and de Quincey and Sir Thomas Browne — all of whom employed words with their etymological force, though none of them were so radically “classical” or “plain” as Borges himself. Indeed, unlike them Borges used the technique of what I’ve called etymologized words as a way of cutting through the baroque, trimming it down, not perpetuating it — as a way of making an efficient writing, packing a great deal of meaning into the story by freighting words with not just dictionary meaning, but their entire historical significance.
{…} But back to the distinguishing marks of Borges’s style. As I began to edit and revise my translations, I discovered that they seemed choppy to me, that I could never manage to read with any speed, that I kept getting stopped by what were remarkably short sentences, by periods or by the semi-colons that linked otherwise independent clauses together. It has been my experience through the translation of a couple of million words of Spanish or so that Spanish writers do not use many semi-colons; they use commas and conjunctions, or frequently relative pronouns, to link clauses together so they flow. They employ a style filled with compound-complex sentences; they concatenate clauses, pack a sentence with all the baggage it will bear — and then pack in a little more and sit on it. Not Borges. Borges apparently wanted to slow the reader down by using the speed bumps, those policias muertos, of the period and the semicolon. As I began to look more closely, I realized some other things. Borges, of course, as I had known since the beginning, likes parallelism, chiasmus, subtle repetitions-with-variations. He is a very classical writer, in that sense. But what I also realized was that he is a paratactic rather than hypotactic writer, using coordinating conjunctions (and, but, etc.) much more often than subordinating. This is also the style of Whitman, from whom Borges seems to have borrowed those “mismatched catalogs” that he is famous for. And punctuating with the semi-colon correlates with that tendency toward parataxis, for it suppresses or soft-pedals the causal connections that another writer might make with subordinating conjunctions and other sorts of explanations. The suppression frees Borges from having to make explicit how one detail or fact or sentence is related to the other — does a consequently go here? a while? a nonetheless? a because? a despite? — and I believe it adds to the mysteriousness that we sense in some of the statements, the sense that some unexplained or inexplicable thing lies under the surface of this prose. The semi-colon also produces spareness, and a particular, recognizable rhythm. It became clear to me in a way that I had never really analyzed before, but only intuited, that Borges was, in a word, a man who had not just studied but absorbed the rules of classical rhetoric.
“Okay pack it up! We’ve used every religion we could to come to this conclusion!”
soo what your headline should read is “children raised without religion are kinder and more empathetic than children raised Christian”
“children raised without religion are kinder and more empathetic than children raised Christian”
…is not only accurate, but an indictment against what the so-called “Christian faith” has become.
One of the things that drove me out was when I was working as a youth minister and during a small group activity we asked the kids, “if a friend at school said they didn’t pray, what would you say to them?” And this middle schooler with all sincerity said “I’d tell them that I was better than them.” And try my damnest I could NOT get her to concede that point or try to hypothetically approach the situation with anything resembling compassion or humility. She just kept insisting “but it’s true, I am better than them.” And I just thought, I can’t undo this. I can’t unteach this entrenched hate.
I still feel a lot of despair about that moment and leaving what I thought for a long time was my calling.
-most of the kids were Muslim (by a huge margin, almost ½ of the total) -there were more non-religious kids involved than Christian kids -this study was not about Christianity -y'all are furious about Christian hegemony to such an extent that you’re ignoring studies of mostly Muslims -you are the ones being Christian-centric -tumblr’s inability to do a tiny bit of research is not a good look -how dare you say we piss on thr poor
My current vidya-related fascination is Western RPGs from that weird liminal space of design from between 2001-2004, where the genre was just starting to leave PCs behind but hadn’t quitestarted being designed with consoles in mind first.
What I mean by that is that RPGs of any kind almost invariably have commands, UI, and perspective that’s meant to accommodate the particular type of control you’re using. Games are almost always designed so that how you physicallyinteract with the hardwareis reflective in how you interact with the software.
One of the reasons Real-Time Strategy games are so incredibly rare on consoles is that virtually all of them from 1993 onward drew direct lineage from Dune II, whose then-novel mouse controls took direct inspiration from the click-and-drag interface used by the Apple Macintosh. While some RTS games did exist prior to widespread adoption of mouse controls, Dune II had such a foundational influence on how games of its kind played that mouse and keyboard is practically in the very geneticsof Real-Time Strategy. Any attempt to separate mouse controls from the long-since-codified design of RTS games is going to end up feeling awkward and clunky, as Halo Wars learned the hard way.
So that brings us back to Western RPGs. Prior to around 2000, any RPG that wasn’t by a Japanese developer was assumed to be made for PCs first, and that came with all the design conventions appropriate for a mouse and keyboard. But back in the early aughts, there was beginning to be something of a shift. Throughout the late 90s the genre of RPG had been firmly defined by a “J.” So as the subsequent PS2 and Xbox era started up, we saw more PC-centric developers from the “W” side of RPGs begin to make the shift to consoles. Consoles were still largely new territory for these developers though, there were still some odd holdovers from PC game design in the games they put out.
Having recently started playing through both Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur’s Gate, what really struck me right out the gate is how these games play near identicallyfrom a purely mechanical standpoint. They’re both real-time-with-pause games that put a high degree of emphasis on party management, positioning, and timing your characters’ abilities through the use of queued commands. But KoToR also crucially changed the way you viewedyour characters’ actions, with the game now being seen through an over-the-shoulder camera that follows whichever character is currently selected.
This shift in camera made it mucheasier to follow the action from where the average console gamer saw it, which was on a CRT television placed some distance away from a couch. Without this simple change in how the game is viewed, it’s likely KoToR would have never even been a viable product on the Xbox.
At the same time though, Bioware’s assumptions of a mouse-controlled game still bleed into the menu designs, UI, and even some of the basic gameplay mechanics like moving to an object in the world by selecting it. Bethesda’s Morrowind was likewise made much more Xbox-friendly than their previous RPGs, mostly by way of the greatly reduced number of buttons needed for play, yet it also retained a lot of clearly PC-centric design elements in the status and dialogue menus. The end result was this very brief point in time where RPGs were in an awkward growing phase, between the designed-for-PC RPGs like Baldur’s Gate and Fallout 1, and the designed-for-consoles RPGs like Mass Effect and Fallout 3.
In the past several years there’s been a big push to revive the older, more PC-focused RPGs with titles like Pillars of Eternity, but that weird in-between period where RPGs were not quite made for consoles but also not quite made for PCs is something I genuinely don’t think we’ll ever see again.
As someone who loves reading about writers explaining their work, and as someone who is pro libraries and pro reading for pleasure and who as a child would try to read literally anything I can find this book is like crack to me. I’m barely making a don’t in this thing, but I refuse to put it down. Neil Gaiman just has a way with words, whether it’s fiction or not. I already have a list of people to recommend this book to and I’m only on part two. #neilgaiman #viewfromthecheapseats #reading #fascinating
The Orchid is incredible - not only are there thousands of species all over the world, but this flowering plant is a master of mimicry. Below are 10 quirky and beautiful species of orchid which closely resemble other living creatures.
1. Flying duck orchid (Caleana major)
2. Monkey orchid (Dracula simia)
3. White egret flower (Pecteilis radiata)
4. Naked man orchid (Orchis italica)
5. Dove orchid (Peristeria)
6. Laughing bee orchid (Ophrys apifera)
7. Swaddled baby orchid (Anguloa uniflora)
8. Moon orchid which appears to have a tiger inside (Phalaenopsis amabilis)
Tom Hiddleston reads an excerpt from Extreme Metaphors- Interviews with J G Ballard featuring an interview with the author from Search & Destroy; first published in 1978.
Get the book here, read the original article here and check out the transcript of the snippet Tom reads below and see just how incredibly well Ballard predicts the growth and changes of our relationship with technology:
the ‘will people feed you’ discourse rn is very funny and hopefully a wake up call to some of the rude freaks scattered out there across europe, but I do want to note that the cultures we’re talking about are cultures of the affluent. literally everywhere I have visited, working class people share food as a matter of course. everywhere I have visited, working class people push drinks and snacks on you the moment you walk in the door. there’s a layer to this conversation that only exists among people who have the choice to be miserly and unaffected by their neighbours behaving the same way.
the first time I experienced being completely shut out of another family’s mealtime, it was when I was a teenager on an exchange trip to the netherlands. I was staying with this family, and literally reliant on them for food and housing. The day I arrived they explained to me what time mealtimes were, and that I would not be fed unless I arrived at the table on time. One morning I was running a little behind because I had trouble figuring out how the shower worked, and when I came downstairs my hosts were already eating. They hadn’t set a place for me, and they all ignored me and continued conversing in dutch. When I timidly tried to serve myself, they gave me look as if I had just walked in off the street and started raiding the refrigerator. They were an intimidatingly affluent family.
one morning the mother had to drop me off early at my work placement, before the building opened. I was sitting outside on a wall for like 50 minutes by myself with nothing to do, and an older lady running a food cart nearby started chatting to me (she wanted to know I was okay, because I was like 15 and not in school, and was very interested to hear that I was on exchange from scotland). she offered me a free breakfast, and when I said I’d already eaten she gave me a drink and a packet of crisps to keep for lunch, and kept trying to make me try fried things that were apparently dutch specialities but were way too much for me at 8am. she was very sweet and funny, and had infinitely more in common with the poorer dutch students who I would meet at a separate pan-european thing later than with any of the kids or parents around the upper middle class academy we were paired with that year. people are people everywhere, some are just more inclined to worry about appearances than others.
There’s a sort of, “do for yourself and I’ll do for myself” that unnerved me about learning to navigate upper-class friendships and homes. After thinking about it for years, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s ultimately about maintaining independence and avoiding the class shame of appearing to need others — but the effects manifest as a bizarre standoffishness, an artificial separation of “yours” and “mine”. The class standards they impose on themselves, are imposed on guests.
I was initially baffled that, for instance, family members or friends who come to visit you are often expected to stay in a hotel or at an AirBNB, not at your house. “But you have a whole-ass house”, I would think. “Or floors. And blankets. Lots of things. You can put them in your beds and sleep on the floor, if they don’t want the couch.” Often, they would have guest bedrooms, but these bedrooms were not offered to most visitors. So, you’ve literally got an EMPTY BEDROOM FOR GUESTS, but no?? You expect them to house themSELVES? Elsewhere?? On THEIR dollar? That’s so expensive! Also, to my mind, frankly rude!
I also noticed that my wealthier friends never pick up groceries for each other. They never call or text each other like, “yo, I’m at X, do you need anything”. I think they would risk confusion at best and deep offense at worst, if one of them got a wild hair up their ass and tried it. It’s too personal, implies some degree of inter-reliance.
It makes relationships look and feel artificially constrained.
This is all completely accurate to my experience too. I think a major cultural absence in wealthier social circles is the concept of ongoing reciprocity / gifting relationships. For me, and for more or less everyone I’ve ever met who grew up poor, it is a normal and natural gesture of closeness to offer resources when you have them and to accept resources when you need them. It’s a way of saying that you trust somebody - either you trust them to have your back when you need it, or you trust them to care for you without ulterior motives. I’m talking about small costs, grocery money, meals here and there, maybe a movie ticket if everyone is going and one person can’t stretch to afford it this month. Nobody keeps track of the expenses, you just remember who you have built those relationships with, and you share in return when you get the opportunity.
Larger costs tend to be more difficult, and that’s because often it’s impossible to be sure that you will ever be able to adequately reciprocate. As a teenager I had one friend in particular who was much more wealthy than the rest of us, and he was a wonderfully kind, warm hearted, generous person who would often offer to pay for entire outings or trips on his own so that the rest of us could participate. And it was really, really awkward, because what was a small gesture in his eyes was something that the poorest of us knew we could never pay back. He might not have cared about keeping track of the cost, but we would never be able to forget it, and that would upset the balance of the reciprocal relationship. I don’t think he ever really understood why we would turn him down, it’s nearly impossible to explain what a strong instinct it is when you have grown up with that dance culturally ingrained in you.
All of that is to say that I think my friend’s behaviour ultimately comes from the same background as the people who go through the world hoarding their resources. When you have never been in a position to need a strong relationship that afforded you emergency childcare or a meal of pizza and beans once in a while over, idk, a ski trip once a year, you can’t understand why big sporadic gifts are turned down. You can’t understand why your poor friends keep insisting on paying for their own gas or trying to do you favours you can easily afford yourself. You can’t understand why kids expect to eat dinner with you (because their families would feed your kids, if they ever needed it, and your kids will never need it).
I also noticed that my wealthier friends never pick up groceries for each other. They never call or text each other like, “yo, I’m at X, do you need anything”.
Why did I not realize this until now
my “friend group” had a HUGE falling-out last semester, literally friendship-ending level stuff, because a couple of us would routinely ask if we could tag along to the grocery store when someone else was going there, or to get a ride to the pharmacy ~5min away from campus. There was so much going on but somehow this was the last straw.
Asking to carpool was being seen as unspeakably rude entitlement and I could not for the life of me understand why until I saw this post
don’t go to an expensive private college on abnormally high scholarships, kids. “You’re being given a practically unheard of amount of scholarship money” = “You will be the poorest person at this school.”
Often scavengers dont have enough time to do more than the face before it gets washed up on the beach, which is what makes this so common.
I wonder if sea faring cultures or specific professions like pirates or sailors would see this more and represent it more in either their mythology or oral traditions.
Writer friends, I discovered a fun website today. It’s called “I Write Like” and here’s the description:
Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.
Nobody’s stopping you from taking 4 tablespoons of butter, melting it in a pot, and adding two tablespoons of minced garlic. Nobody’s stopping you from letting that garlic saute for like two minutes, or from then adding in two tablespoons of shaved parmesan. And nobody will stop you from stirring half a pound of al dented pasta into that buttery mess, cracking some pepper over it, and feasting on the garlicky spoils gained from such labours.
Nobody’s stopping you. The cops can’t even arrest you for it.
I love these beautifully created diagrams that explain the relationship plants, soul and fungi have… its an amazing world living right underneath the ground we walk on.
Just watched a chat between James Cameron and Denis Villeneuve (the director of Dune) and here are some interesting snippets from JimCam:
As the story evolves, part of Avatar will take place on Earth
The 3rd movie is way too long right now and JimCam is struggling to cut it down
Movies 2 and 3 have basically been produced like a 6 hour miniseries. They were filmed 100% concurrently. A few scenes from the 4th movie were also filmed at the same time
The child actors are “allowed to age 6 years in the middle of the story on page 25 of movie 4.” Completely unrelated reminder that it takes a little over 5 years for the ISV to travel from Pandora to Earth :3c
James Cameron mentioned that one of the advantages single movies have over movie franchises is that the audience can’t be sure if the characters are all gonna survive. When movies are serialized with no clear end in sight, the audience knows the characters are gonna survive because the characters have to be in the next movies… which I agree with considering I felt absolutely nothing at the death in Spider-man: No Way Home because I was so sure they would just undo it
“I’m not afraid [of the advent of streaming services], I like change. I’m a child of the 60s, I like it when things are chaotic. But, uh, what we cansee is an expanded form of cinema. I wanna do a movie that’s 6 hours long and2½ hours long at the same time - the same movie. And you can stream it for 6 hours or you can go and have a more condensed, immersive version of that experience in a movie theater. Same movie - just one is the novel and one is the movie.”
They spent 6 years developing simulcam technology for the first Avatar so they could film the actors directly in the CG environment. Part of the reason the sequels were so long underway is just that simulcam technology wasn’t good enough for JimCam’s vision and all the underwater stuff he wanted
The sequels have a “messianic throughline” that’s partially inspired by Dune. There’s a scientific explanation for every single thing that happens, but you don’t have to accept the events in a secular way. You can choose to believe in spiritual explanations instead/in tandem with the scientific facts.
