Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Viewing Moleskine Modality



If you find the text in the posts too small, hold down the Control key and roll the mouse wheel towards you - hey presto! - the text gets bigger



posted by Adfero Affero @ 7:25 AM 0 comments

Moleskine Modality doesn't work in IE



I've said this before. Decided to put up a periodic message to those who might be wondering why there are no side links in this site.

If you view Moleskine Modality in Internet Explorer, you will not get the benefit of the side links. It was created within FireFox, which may explain it, or else I just don't understand the settings in IE.

Whatever is the case, if you want to see the whole site then view it in FireFox. For those of you who didn't know - and many don't - you can run different browsers at the same time and toggle between them, so there is no need to shut down one browser to load another. If you don't have FireFox, why not try it as well as your current browser.

One problem in using two browsers: if you are an assiduous collector of bookmarks/Favourites you might end up saving some in one browser and some in another. Plus of course running two browsers takes up more of your precious RAM.



posted by Adfero Affero @ 5:55 AM 0 comments

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Tintin




Noticed a rather nice newspaper stall when strolling down Passeig de Gracia {2} on a late April day. Requiring a map or two, tried out my rudimentary Spanish on the friendly vendor. Pleased to discover he had a reasonable map selection from which I chose two: a decent large-scale street map and one of departments of Catalunya. Noted on display a large-format magazine with Tintin and Snowy on the white, glossy cover. Vendor, assuming I had no Spanish, told me it was not in English. Told him I could use it to brush up my Spanish : his face lit up and we exchanged a few words about this and that.

The magazine turned out to be a pretty cool Arts mag. called Vanguardia (the Spanish seem to have a flare for these well-designed publications) or a supplement to a newspaper . The April 2007 issue (number 3) is dedicated to Herge on his centenary. It is full of wonderful photos and cartoon pages from Tintin: a magical cornucopia of source material for the enthusiast and an education for anyone who might have thought Tintin just for kids.

Recently came across this Independent article on Herge

and this [added 9 July] by Tom McCarthy in the Guardian:

From Zero to Hero







posted by Adfero Affero @ 11:52 AM 0 comments

Friday, May 25, 2007

Are screenplays literature ?




It's his title, not mine. This essay has three parts:

Are Screenplays literature? Part I

Are Screenplays Literature? Part II

Are Screenplays Literature? Part III

This came about because of a decision suddenly - the decision version of a flash memory which had a simple, clear nachrechtfertigung to drop a very absorbing and pleasurably expanding (the polite word for ideas-creep) novel in favour of a very ancient screenplay/novel project which began in the late 80s.

Without getting through the first part of this essay on the screenplay I was already running with the notions. Yes, of course, the film = the novel. Then: what, if we are drawing tables of analogues, is the novel equivalent of the screenplay? Reading on I see the publication of screenplays as if they were literature has become the thing.

I have never seen the screenplay as the finished product. The bit that we do when we read the book (because it is the reader input which adds the final touch to the skill and insights of the writer) is what the writer (constantly readjusting his script to the needs of the film), director, actors, cinematographer, stage designer, location manager do. Then, as I have hinted at in some of the links under screenplay/scripts, there are later adaptations of the original screenplay floating about which the novice would have no idea are not the start point. It can be difficult to see which is which when someone hasn't been careful enough at the time to record what is what, and/or because things get lost.

I have mentioned something I noticed when doing a generalised screenplay foray a while back: often what you see online is someone's transcription of the film, not the screenplay itself.

To make the screenplay as much like the finished novel ( = [novel] + [readers cognition]} necessitated the writer's instructions. Stating the bleeding obvious, though a perfect dialogue by itself can work pretty well given an imaginative reader, without 'stage' direction something of what is in most novels has been left out. Strictly speaking like is not being compared to like/span>


The money quotes come from part III:

What is Literature?

The 19th-century novelist George Eliot (a woman writing under a man's name) defined literature this way: "the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds (=limits) of our personal lot (=fate)."

Terrence McGiver, a teacher, expands the definition: "Literature helps us grow, both personally and intellectually. It provides an objective base for knowledge and understanding. It links us with the cultural, philosophic, and religious world of which we are part. It enables us to recognize human dreams and struggles in different places and times that we otherwise would never know existed. It helps us develop mature sensibility and compassion for the condition of all living things -- human, animal and vegetable. It gives us the knowledge and perception to appreciate the beauty of order and arrangement, which a well-constructed song or a beautifully painted canvas also gives us."

Other observers have pointed out that literature is written to be read aesthetically; that it emphasizes character over plot; that it must be worth re-reading; that it contains enduring human themes; that it is the opposite of trash.

All these definitions give clues why it's so easy to conclude that screenplays are not literature.





posted by Adfero Affero @ 5:49 PM 0 comments

Monday, May 21, 2007

Italo Calvino - If on a Winter's Night a traveller


Posted this before but it gives me great pleasure to type it out from my notebook: came across it again while idly flicking pages....


What makes love-making and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them time and space open, different from measurable time and space.

Many times I have thought that the good advice of the master-writers, well learned, would obviate the atrocious passages that even quite famous novelists include in their stories. Anyone who want to send me links to examples of inexcrable, inexcusable, unlikely literary love-making, please feel free!



posted by Adfero Affero @ 9:00 AM 2 comments

Friday, May 11, 2007

Shadow of Barc.



Well folks, that's what they call it over there. Over heard a couple of Barcelonans talking football in a bar just a week or so ago....Real vs. Barc. produced a lot of glum, unusually quiet Cataluyans.

The subject today is Barcelona in literature. Not counting Homage to Catalonia which I don't really see as fiction. HTC apparently has a lot of inaccuracies, misinformation, bias - or what we might call spin - in the facts within the 'fiction'. The only other book I have read with a Barc. theme : Shadow of the Wind. But do recommend Woodcock's Anarchism if you want to get a few snippets of Barcelona together with its connection to Spain's 19th. and early 20 C. history.

It is not anything very profound: simply that thing about reading a book and wishing you could check if the street names were real or made up. My paperback copy of SOTW has maps inside both covers. Bit of a tease: a vertical block amounting to half a page 'hides' both the maps.

Having recently visited this great city for the first time, and being mightily impressed - from a cultural point of view if not from the levels of CO and NOXs - I can now recognise which part is shown in the SOTW maps: the area just south of the Universitat below the Grand Via. The business of going through the whole book yellow penning every street name has not come about yet! It's one of those deferred gratification thangs....you know you are going to enjoy doing it but it is also quite pleasurable just to anticipate the enjoyment to come.

To start with - by random page flicking - there is Monjuic Cemetery to check. So far no cemetery IRL, But in looking found a small street off the Las Ramblas called Fortuny, and above it Bonsucces, which gives close readers an idea of how he came up with some of the family names...and the re-realisation that this was a book written in Spanish with a readership familiar with the names, the city and the wordplay possible with the knowledge.

On the theme of Lost in Translation (favourite film right now) - and in memory of a few short passages in Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, we have the problem and fascination of translation which reared up for me big time when studying around Proust a few months ago. How much is lost in translation? Some mathematician must have come up (or will do now that I mention it) with a generalised formula which could be used to say in percentage terms roughly how much any book lost read in another language. Seems like about 25% of ALR to me. Then I can't read French well enough to tell.

posted by Adfero Affero @ 2:23 PM 0 comments

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