Archives for January 2015
we don’t get to choose our own hearts
6 January 2015 | Literature | No Comments
да, и, кстати, романом года[1] с легкостью оказался тот самый “Щегол” Донны Тарт — все было снова, как в детстве, право: и картинная галлерея[2], и Диккенс, и невозможность расстаться с книгой хоть на миг. открытость всегда подкупает? что ж, как и полагается Bildungsroman, у героя ее хватало — как и верности, смелости, и опять честности. впрочем, это лишь мертвые слова наперекор безгранчно живому рассказ:
This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home.
тем более забавно, какие идиотские отзывы умудрился собрать он в русскоязычной среде. что и еще удивительнее, если действительно прочитать книгу — тень Федора Михайловича лежит там на каждой странице, да и сам русский язык забористо ухмыляется читателю между строк: что, dorogoy, еще один стакан?
Well — I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you — wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,’ ‘what if.’ ‘Life is cruel.’ ‘I wish I had died instead of.’ Well — think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no — hang on — this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?
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а вторым, пусть и с большим отставанием, “Пир Джона Сатурналла”, столь же неизмеримо волшебный и ищущий. ↩
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там, где “Урок анатомии” и “Жемчужная сережка” — где напротив, на берегу, утопают Генеральные штаты, а под боком небоскребы ушлым аистом задирают облака. ↩
the return to zero
5 January 2015 | Biology, Culturology, Wine | No Comments
а вот прекрасное на память:
Some words for hangover, like ours, refer prosaically to the cause: the Egyptians say they are “still drunk,” the Japanese “two days drunk,” the Chinese “drunk overnight.” The Swedes get “smacked from behind.” But it is in languages that describe the effects rather than the cause that we begin to see real poetic power. Salvadorans wake up “made of rubber,” the French with a “wooden mouth” or a “hair ache.” The Germans and the Dutch say they have a “tomcat,” presumably wailing. The Poles, reportedly, experience a “howling of kittens.” My favorites are the Danes, who get “carpenters in the forehead.” In keeping with the saying about the Eskimos’ nine words for snow, the Ukrainians have several words for hangover. And, in keeping with the Jews-don’t-drink rule, Hebrew didn’t even have one word until recently. Then the experts at the Academy of the Hebrew Language, in Tel Aviv, decided that such a term was needed, so they made one up: hamarmoret, derived from the word for fermentation. (Hamarmoret echoes a usage of Jeremiah’s, in Lamentations 1:20, which the King James Bible translates as “My bowels are troubled.”)
и еще:
Kingsley Amis described the opening of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” with the hero discovering that he has been changed into a bug, as the best literary representation of a hangover.
предпочитаю не трезветь, о, да.
в чужих монастырях
3 January 2015 | Culturology | No Comments
замечательный разговор @ reddit о том, что странного было в вашем детстве — как, например, переодеваться в пижаму сразу же, как только заходишь домой (или “My parents never believed in Finland”). но есть и совершенно волшебные рассказы, пожалуйста:
My parents allowed us to engage in all kinds of mischief and destruction without judgement or consequence. It’s hard to explain in a single phrase, but basically we could do whatever we could think up.
There are a lot of pros and cons to it. For one, we were all able to engage in a lot of creative thinking, but on the other hand, we didn’t have knowledge of the basic rules of society. So early on, I’d go over to a friends house to play, and I would be like, wait – so you’re NOT allowed to turn all the living room furniture upside down and onto the side to build forts? Sometimes not knowing the rules resulted in embarrassment, or worse, lost friendships.
We did amazing things, stupid things, useless things, things that made sense, and things that made no sense at all. We’d drag every mattress in the house into the living room and pile them in a stack and jump on them. We slid down the stairs on sleds built from cardboard boxes, sleeping bags, and pillows. We went to bed when we got tired, ate when we were hungry, shed or put on clothes when we were hot or cold. If I decided to paint my bedroom at 3:00 AM, no one would say a word. We’d cook made up recipes at 11:00 at night. Chicken spaghetti and scrambled eggs with sauce? No problem. Feeding the lump of dough you made out of flour, water, and sugar to your sister didn’t raise an eyebrow. Let’s see what happens if we try to fry it or bake it in the oven. We were only limited by our poverty. The only thing I remember not being allowed to do was to jump off the second floor roof with a pillowcase parachute.
We all survived. Our lives were far from perfect, but they were never dull. These days, my siblings are the best people I know. We’re all successful in our own ways, and we have a bond that I don’t see among other families. Our childhood was tragic and sad and wild and filled with adventure, but above all it was 100% unique.
и еще:
Most people don’t dissect the thanksgiving turkey and giblets before cooking dinner.
Every year my mom would do an age appropriate anatomy lecture for all the kids using the turkey for her demonstration and an anatomy book for clarification as she explained how bird organs and bones differed from human ones. She’d make us name the tendons and ligaments on the bird and point out the corresponding ones on our own arms and legs.
Sometimes, after the bird had been analyzed, stuffed, and placed in the oven, she’d grab the cat and show how his claws retracted and extended and how that correlated to the first joint on our fingers. We then had to point out his major muscle groups as a sort of quiz to show we’d been paying attention and had learned something. We would continue the animal science anatomy lecture until the cat got tired of being manhandled and ran off.
Apparently most people just cook and eat the turkey.
I hope I’ll be as awesome as your mom one day.
She’s pretty amazing. I love my mom. The cat loves her too, even if he did spend a lot of time as a teaching aid.
все мы
2 January 2015 | Culturology, Internet | No Comments
немножко радостного интернета:
So it comes back to this. When we talk about the need for diversity in tech, we’re not doing it because we like quota systems. Diverse backgrounds produce differing points of view. And those differences are needed if we are to put the flowering of internet genius to use actually helping humanity with its many terrifying and seemingly intractable problems.
If we keep throwing only young, mostly white, mostly upper middle class people at the engine that makes our digital world go, we’ll keep getting camera and reminder and hookup apps—things that make an already privileged life even smoother—and we’ll keep producing features that sound like a good idea to everyone in the room, until they unexpectedly stab someone in the heart.
впереди
1 January 2015 | Culturology, Personal | No Comments
лучше не скажешь:
With all these great technological advances swarming around me and an endless amount of information at my disposal, even when I’m sitting still it feels like I’m moving at a million miles an hour without still knowing who I am.
с новым годом.