A Rolling Stone Gathers No Mold, Either

I took this picture of Angela just a few days ago:

She was cleaning one of the drawers in her part of the closet because some of her clothes had gotten mold. In the past I've written about the myriad things around here that have gotten mold, so it's hardly worth mentioning at this point, except that when I was reading more of Paulo Coelho's Brida this afternoon I came across the following quote from p. 138 (It also shows how weird written quotations are in Spanish-language books, as the only two quotation marks are ones I put in):

   "...Wicca le pregunt� si usaba todas las ropas que pose�a.

   --Claro que no --fue la respuesta.

   --Pues, a partir de esta semana, utiliza todo lo que est� en tu armario.

   Brida crey� que no hab�a entendido bien.

   --Todo lo que contiene nuestra energ�a debe estar siempre en movimiento --dijo Wicca--. Las ropas que t� compraste forman parte de ti y representan momentos especiales. [...] Las ropas siempre transforman emoci�n en materia. Son uno de los puentes entre lo visible y lo invisible. Existen ciertas ropas que, inclusive, son capaces de hacer da�o, porque fueron hechas para otras personas y acabaron en tus manos."

I don't know about you, but that seems to me like a pretty clear justification and argument for my Ryan's Patented Clothes Rotating System if there ever was one!

Sitzbook: "Death in Venice"

The cover of the book indicates that it's been made into a movie by Warner Brothers.

I've not technically seen the movie, but I can tell you this: It's boring as shit.

As part of my ongoing Sitzbook project I read Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. I actually read this when I was in grad school, but Bobby offered to loan it to me, and it seemed like a quick read in a time when I'm trying to get closer to hitting my goal of 52 books by the end of the year.

Well, it is a quick read, but it's also a bit of a dull read. The most remarkable thing about it is that I actually read it in German the first time around; it's been scientifically proven that books in German are 37% more depressing than books in other languages. If you don't believe me, you should have seen the reading list for the German MA program. Over half the books ended with the protagonist dying, committing suicide, and/or murdering someone (usually a lover). 

But I digress. I guess the best thing I can say about Death in Venice is that it has a very succinct title. In fact, it pretty much tells you the plot of most of the book. A guy goes to Venice, sees a boy, and dies. Sure, he also walks down to the beach a bit and eats some meals, and Mann's sure to recount those events in excruciating detail, but that's really about it.

It was a quick read, at least, but if Mann had had a sharper editor, he probably could have pared it down to pamphlet size with the same end result.

So, that's it for now. Thanks to Bobby for loaning me the book, even though it wasn't my favorite one ever. And thanks to you for reading, and please stay tuned for more Blogtoberfest fun!

Content Warning: Literary Nipple!

Blogtoberfest continues! Willkommen!

If you've been following my Sitzbook book-a-week project, you may have noticed that there was a nipple on the cover of one of the books. And it wasn't just any old disembodied nipple floating in space (as nipples are apt to do, I'm told). No, my friends, it was a female nipple, on a female breast! For shame! I would normally just have made a short joke or comment about this, but then I started over-analyzing things, and eventually a blog post became inevitable. 

Before we go any further, and so we're all on the same page, here's the picture of the book cover in question, from the Spanish-language version of Isabel Allende's In�s del Alma M�a ("In�s of My Soul"):

As you can see, the picture on the cover is old-looking; in fact the credit says it's called Desnudo/"Nude" and it's an 1890 photo attributed to Leopold Reutlinger, whose name sounds suspiciously German (the plot thickens: Germans just love nipples on book covers, billboards, and bus stop ads!). But what's it doing on the cover of a historical novel about In�s Suarez, a Spanish woman who helped found the nation of Chile through the conquering and suppression of its native tribes?

I know that this book cover nipple isn't just an isolated phenomenon, since at one point we had three Latin American-published books in our house that had nipples on their covers (The other two were Paulo Coelho's La Bruja de Portobello and Gustavo Bol�var Moreno's Sin Tetas No Hay Para�so). I think that if these books were sold in the U.S., someone would strategically put a "15% off!" sticker over the nipples in question. Either that, or else there'd be a controversy called "Nipplegate* 2011."

Let me make one thing clear: I think it's fine that there's a nipple on the cover of this book. I don't care. In fact, I think that most books should probably have nipples on their covers, just in case (except cookbooks... that would be weird). But I have noticed that the nipple aspect makes this book more interesting. For example, Angela read the book after I did, and so did our friend Adriana. Both seemed embarrassed to be reading such a tit-ilating book in public, but they weren't able to explain why exactly they felt that way.

So I guess this leads me to a series of questions: 

1. Did you know the German word for "nipple" is Brustwarze? Did you know that literally translated, that means "Breast-wart"? Isn't that wonderful?

2. Is a cover like this "indecent" or even simply "problematic"? Do people still get offended by an exposed nipple or breast these days? If so, do such people fan themselves, swoon, and then experience fainting spells when they see nipples?

3. If nipples aren't problematic or indecent, is it because this is a novel? Does that have anything to do with it? What if it were an advertisement for margarine? 

4. Would a book like this be sold out in the open in the U.S. and if so, would anyone comment about it (besides me, of course)?

5. How is it that a proportionally higher number of "nipply" books seem to be published and sold in Latin America, a region that at least to me seems to be more prudish and prohibitive than the U.S. when it comes to general public nudity?

6. Is this non-controversial because it depicts breasts and nipples, and not the "junk" of one's nether-regions? 

7. If this is OK, then why aren't there topless beaches in Latin America? 

8. Is all of this just a ploy to try to trick people into reading?

Please answer the questions in complete sentences, using a number 2 pencil, on a separate sheet of college-ruled, loose-leaf paper. You have 30 minutes. Please begin.

Oh, and by the way, the book was really good. As the Brits might say, "It's the tits!"

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more Blogtoberfest fun! 

*The only thing that should be called "nipplegate" is a door that leads to actual nipples, like the entrance to a strip club.

Sitzbook: "Siddhartha"

Three of the four versions I have of this book. It's a bit worrying that I have
that many copies of one book. Isn't that the type of thing crazy people do?

When I first read Siddhartha it was assigned reading for an Asian Humanities class in high school. I really liked it, and I guess that proves that not everything that you have to read in school is awful. In fact, I counted it as one of my top 10 favorite novels, at least until recently, when I decided to give a few books a second read-through to see if they were as good as I remembered them to be. The book was still good, but maybe since it was actually one of the few books I'd read more than once (at least one additional time each in German and English), it didn't jump out at me or seem as special as it once had. It may also have something to do with the fact that for the first half of the book I was alternating between the English, German, and Spanish versions. It's kind of weird, but since I somehow had acquired all three (and a fourth free version on the Kindle, I later remembered), I wanted to take advantage of them. For the second half, though, I was more eager to take advantage of a long weekend to get ahead on my Sitzbook project, so I blazed through the English version so that I could check out the Hunger Games series.

Siddhartha still does have some nuggets of wisdom, though, so I mainly wanted to write this post to include a few of my favorite quotes from the book:

(p. 52) �Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.�

(p. 113) ��When someone is seeking,� said Siddhartha, �it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.��

(p. 115) �Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish [�] Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, like it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.�

Well, that's it for today. If you've read or re-read this book, I'd love to hear your take on it. Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

Sitzbook: "Blood Meridian"

I've been reading like a madman this last week: 4 books in 3 days, or 3 books in 2 days, or any other numerical comparison you'd like. As a result, I've gotten behind on a few other things, but I wanted to catch up a bit on Sitzbook with a quick quote from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. I borrowed this book from Lucy and she was right--the writing is excellent, although significantly denser than the only other book of his I've read, The Road. This one is also disturbingly violent and racist in a few sections, since it follows a group of people who go to Mexico to kill Indians in the 1850s. That's not a premise that's going to have a flowery style, I suppose. 

Still, the writing's really good. Check out this, from page 50:

"They rode through regions of particolored stone upthrust in ragged kerfs and shelves of traprock reared in faults and anticlines curved back upon themselves and broken off like stumps of great stone treeboles and stones the lightning had clove open, seeps exploding in steam in some old storm. They rode past trapdykes of brown rock running down the narrow chines of the ridges and onto the plain like the ruins of old walls, such auguries everywhere of the hand of man before man was or any living thing."

Wait: "Huh?" I often tell my students that since English has such a big vocabulary, native speakers often read books or newspaper articles without understanding every word. My students sometimes don't believe me, but indeed, there are at least a half dozen words that I don't recognize in this paragraph, and another three or four I'd be hard pressed to define. In fact, I just realized that I'm not even sure what "Blood Meridian" is supposed to mean. I imagine it's not got anything to do with the Prime Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time, but I'm not even certain about that. In any case, I guess the conclusion to this post is that the book is good and I'm a dumbass.

Quotes From "Under a Cruel Star"

A few of the books I read in May and June. The one mentioned here is the purple one.

In my Sitzbook project I recently read Under a Cruel Star by Heda Margolius Kov�ly. It was really good, and I actually had already read it about 5 or 10 years ago. It's a memoir written by a Czech woman who survived the concentration camps. Later in her life, she got married, only to have to suffer while her husband was wrongly accused and put on trial by the later Communist government. That's the two sentence synopsis that doesn't give too much away so if I'm not making it seem like a great book, that's completely my fault.

I've gotten a bit behind on Sitzbook reviews and commentaries, and I can't write a review for each weekly book, but I wanted to at least put up some quotes from this book. Maybe they'll entice you to check it out:

p. 52: �It was becoming evident to many that while evil grows all by itself, good can be achieved only through hard struggle and maintained only through tireless effort, that we had to set out clear, boldly-conceived goals for ourselves and join forces to attain them. The problem was that everyone envisioned these goals differently.�

p. 68: �In order to be able to live and work in peace, to raise children, to enjoy the small and great joys life can offer, you must not only find the right partner, choose the right occupation, respect the laws of your country and your own conscience but, most importantly, you must have a solid social foundation on which to build such a life. You have to live in a social system with whose fundamental principles you agree, under a government you can trust. You cannot build a happy private life in a corrupt society anymore than you can build a house in a muddy ditch. You have to lay a foundation first.�

p. 131: �She was young and pretty and she accepted life with all its trials cheerfully, like a bird in the sky. She was yet another proof to me that nothing limits a person more than what was then called �a clearly-defined world view.� The people who, in my experience, proved the most astute and dependable in a crisis were always those who professed the simplest ideology: love of life. Not only did they possess an instinctive ability to protect themselves from danger but they were often willing to help others as a matter of course, without ulterior motives or any heroic posturing.�

So, that's all for the moment. Angela and I are back in Costa Rica catching up on stuff, but I'm hoping to put up some Colorado pictures soon (there are some on flickr already, but it's a process, you know). And it seems that I've gotten almost two months behind on posting Pictures of the Day! How is that even possible?! Plus, I've got to do a few posts for Sitzman ABC and Sitztoast, so I'm keeping busy!

Thanks for reading; have a good one!